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Showing posts with label Smith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Smith. Show all posts

Friday, January 16, 2026

Galaxy, Sept '52: K MacLean, E E Smith, G R Dickson, and J H Schmitz

In response to a blog post in which I mildly praised "The Faithful Friend," a story by Evelyn E. Smith, a woman who has over fifty short story credits at isfdb, one of my knowledgeable readers recommended Smith's "Tea Tray in the Sky."  "Tea Tray in the Sky" debuted in the September 1952 issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy, an issue which also includes a discourse on heroism in fiction and in real life from Gold, reviews by Groff Conklin of collections of old stories by David H. Keller, A. E. van Vogt and John W. Campbell, Jr, and brandy new stories by Katherine MacLean, Gordon R. Dickson and James H. Schmitz.  Let's get a peek at what kind of product Gold was selling back in the fall of 1952, nineteen years before I was born, by reading MacLean's, Dickson's and Schmitz's stories as well as Smith's.

"The Snowball Effect" by Katherine MacLean

Looks like I've read three stories by MacLean over the years.  We've got "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" published in Ben Bova's Analog, and "Unhuman Sacrifice" and "Feedback," both from Campbell's Astounding.  I liked two of those three stories; let's hope "The Snowball Effect" makes that score 3 to 1.

The narrator of "The Snowball Effect" has recently been made dean and president of a university and charged with making the university profitable.  He goes to the head of the Sociology Department and asks this joker to explain how the Sociology Department can bring in money.  The professor claims he has come up with mathematical formulas that can describe and predict how organizations grow or shrink in size and power.  He tells the narrator that, if given six months, he can prove the value of sociology, and the prof and the prez develop a plan to experiment on some local people, try to make their little organization grow.

Using math equations, the sociology prof develops a scientifically designed constitution and organization chart for a local women's sewing club and gives it to the most ambitious and competent member of the club.  The twist of the story is that, four months later, when the prez checks in on the sewing club, he finds the competent woman has revolutionized the sewing club, turning it into a sort of social welfare NGO and using the super-scientific constitution and organization chart to grow the club into an entity of thousands.  The objective of this organization is to revolutionize the town, fashion it into "the jewel of the United States" with "a bright and glorious future—potentially without poor and without uncared-for ill—potentially with no ugliness, no vistas which are not beautiful—the best people in the best planned town in the country...."  By the sixth month mark the organization is huge, and has incorporated into itself businesses and politicians.  The protagonists predict in a decade or so the organization will take over America and then the world.  They expect that the organization will then, as all big institutions do, collapse, perhaps throwing the entire world into chaos, as when the Roman Empire collapsed.

This is an idea story that maybe is supposed to be funny, rather than a human story with suspense or human relationships, and everything about the idea is questionable, but "The Snowball Effect" isn't too long and it isn't poorly written or constructed, and I guess the idea is sort of interesting, so we're giving it a rating of acceptable.

I may think the story is just OK, but lots of editors are into it, maybe because it is very much about science, like a traditional science fiction story should be, but instead of romanticizing a hard science or engineering, disciplines anybody can see are awesome without having to be told they are awesome, in "The Snowball Effect" MacLean ups the level of difficulty she faces by tackling the task of trying to portray as effective one of those soft sciences we all instinctively know is a scam.  You can find "The Snowball Effect" in H. L. Gold's Second Galaxy Reader, Brian Aldiss' Penguin Science Fiction, Damon Knight's Science Fiction Inventions, multiple anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name printed on their covers, Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell's Ascent of Wonder, the Vandermeers' Big Book of Science Fiction, and still other publications.  I daresay "The Snowball Effect" is a wish fulfillment fantasy for leftists, who dream of technocratic elites using mathematical formulas to control the masses and reshape society to their own specifications, but, to her credit, MacLean in her story leaves room for the reader to believe she is suggesting that giving an organization the key to easily conquering the world might be a mistake, that "The Snowball Effect" is a horror story rather than a utopian story.           


"Tea Tray in the Sky" by Evelyn E. Smith

This story, the story that brought us to this issue of Galaxy, is a long plot-light satire of television, advertising, the metastasizing of the Christmas season far beyond December 24th and 25th, and, most importantly, the cult of tolerance and perhaps mass immigration.  We might say the story is about the internal contradictions of Western liberalism, or democratic capitalism, or whatever we want to call the ideology, mores and norms of the mid-20th-century United States.

It is the future of intergalactic civilization.  The human race is in intimate daily contact with dozens of other intelligent species.  In the interest of tolerance, the taboos (spelled here "tabus") of all races are enforced by law almost everywhere in the populated universe.  For example, in New York City on Earth, if you want to eat you have to do so very discretely, alone and out of sight, because one race of aliens finds eating as gauche to talk about and as private a matter as you or I might consider defecating.  Everyone in the inhabited universe must wear gloves and a hat because there are races of aliens who never show their fingers or the tops of their heads.  And so on--Smith gives many examples.  Perhaps most alarming is the outlawing of monogamy--marriage is forbidden, free love is mandatory.  There are, apparently, government spies and informers everywhere who will make sure you are thrown in prison for uttering any one of the verboten expressions or or performing any of the forbidden behaviors inscribed on the ever-expanding list of taboos imported from every cover of the known universe.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a young man who has spent his entire life in a sort of monastery or retreat in California, having been brought there as a young child.  Before advancing to the next level of membership in "the Brotherhood," he has decided to see what life is like in the mainstream world.  He takes an airplane ride to New York, and "Tea Tray in the Sky" story describes his experience of culture shock, offering us one farcical joke after another.  Besides all the wacky taboos, there is the fact that it is July, and New York is covered in red and green decorations because Christmas is approaching, and, more importantly, the ubiquity of television; TVs are everywhere, pumping out hard-sell advertising, and it is illegal to turn them off, as that would be an infringement of free enterprise.  This society is strongly committed to free trade and the market economy--the word "tariff" is a dirty one and price controls are not exercised.    

"Tea Tray in the Sky" seems to dramatize how some liberal values, like market economics, tolerance, freedom of movement, if pursued and defended to the nth degree, can infringe on other liberal values, like free speech and freedom of association.  Smith's story may also express the annoyance of publishers and broadcasters at having to craft their content with an eye to not offending religious people and anti-communists, and maybe even frustration at the way average white Americans may have been expected to alter their behavior to accommodate blacks and immigrants.

Anyway, the protagonist, after experiencing a New York full of aliens of all types where you can't get married or eat in public and where you have to scrupulously watch what you say and you can't even walk more than two hundred yards because the sight of you strolling around may trigger depression in aliens who have no feet, decides to return to the Brotherhood, where, and I guess this is sort of a twist ending, there are human female residents as well as human male, so he can cultivate the sort of sexual relationship and family life considered normal in the 1950s USA.

"Tea Tray in the Sky" is sort of interesting as an historical document, in particular because issues like mass immigration and tariffs and infringements on free speech in the interest of tolerance are so central to the politics of Western nations today in the Trump Era.  But as a piece of fiction it is not terribly compelling, it being variations on the same few jokes--bizarre taboos and annoying TV commercials--repeated again and again.  

Another acceptable story.  

H. L. Gold included "Tea Tray in the Sky" in the Second Galaxy Reader along with MacLean's "Snowball Effect."  The story would reappear in the 21st century in Smith collections and in an anthology of stories from Galaxy penned by women.  


"The Mousetrap" by Gordon R. Dickson

Here we have one of those stories which opens with the protagonist not knowing who he is or where he is.  Dickson describes our protagonist exploring a brightly lit landscape with a house on it in some detail, the flowers and grass and paths and rooms blah blah blah.  Though the area is lit there is no sun in the sky, and the main character, when he walks away from the house but then comes upon it again, realizes he is on some kind of sphere, like a tiny planet or something.

Gradually our guy begins to regain his memory, and we get a picture of a crazy future interstellar civilization centered on Earth.  Our hero was born on Earth, which faces spectacular overpopulation, which causes an unemployment problem.  The shortage of work is exacerbated by the fact that people who get rich on one of Earth's many colonies return to Earth to take the plum jobs.  So, like so many others, when our protagonist came of working age he was exiled to the colonies.

Our guy loved Earth; in particular, he loved moonlit nights.  He worked hard, for years and years, to get back to Earth.  The economy of the colonies is fast growing, and trade amongst the various colonies and Terra is brisk, and there is a lot of government corruption and onerous red tape and, as a result, lots of black market and smuggling activity.  By necessity, anybody who engages in interstellar commerce on any scale has to engage in all sorts of bribery and special favors done and that sort of thing.  Our hero became an expert at knowing who to bribe, how to bribe them, and whatever else it takes to get shipments hither and thither efficiently through the maze of unjust laws and sketchy lawbreakers.  Eventually somebody hired him for a big job and he took the huge amount of cash they gave him to use for bribes stole it for use in getting back to Earth.  He was eventually arrested and imprisoned for the theft, but at least he was on Earth and having bought citizenship with the stolen money he looked forward to living the rest of his life on Terra after getting out of prison in ten years or so.  His memory goes dark after his conviction--he doesn't know how he ended up on this lonely little brightly lit world.

Some nonhuman aliens land their spacecraft on the little world and they seem friendly enough but post hypnotic suggestion (that he has been hypnotized has been foreshadowed) leads to our hero throwing a switch which traps the aliens in a forcefield.  The aliens are stuck in the trap so long they die.  Then a government ship arrives and an official explains to our protagonist what is up.  The hero was "volunteered" for duty manning a trap satellite planted beyond the current reaches of the human space empire.  Such satellite traps provide the Terran government specimens for study; this gives Terra a leg up on aliens we haven't formally met yet, facilitating the incorporation of them into our empire.

The tragic ending is that our guy is not only now complicit in murder that facilitates imperialism, but can't go back to Earth because, having been in close contact with mysterious aliens, he must be quarantined for the rest of his life on a planet on the edge of human space.  To add insult to injury, this planet doesn't have a moon!  Our moonlight-loving guy will never see moonlight again!

This story is OK.  A lot of the exposition about the Earth economy and description of the trap satellite and even the protagonist's career seems superfluous--it isn't bad but it isn't very entertaining intrinsically and it doesn't really add to the plot.  The plot gimmick, of a criminal manning a trap for aliens he doesn't even realize is a trap, is similar to the gimmick of Eric Frank Russell's "Panic Button," which appeared in Astounding in 1959.  One has to wonder if Dickson's story here inspired or influenced Russell and/or Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in the creation of that later (and I have to admit, more entertaining) story. 

"The Mousetrap" would be included in the oft-reprinted Dickson collection The Star Road and a German anthology which repurposed as its cover the cover of Richard Lupoff's Space War Blues, which is odd, as it is a pretty specific image, what with its Confederate States of America imagery; there is no Lupoff fiction is included in the book--could one of the included stories also be about some kind of Confederacy in space? 
           

"The Altruist" by James H. Schmitz

This is probably the best story we're reading today, or at least the most ambitious, as it integrates philosophical ideas and SF speculations (and presents them seriously, not as some kind of joke or satire) and a human story with suspense and human relationships.  Schmitz's ideas revolve around the mysterious workings of the human mind; Schmitz proposes the theory that people are essentially altruistic and, often subconsciously, always trying to help society and others, and he takes as a main theme of the story knowledge and ignorance of quotidian things, the way we notice and fail to notice things, consciously, subconsciously, and due to the manipulations of others. 

Our protagonist is a colonel with a desk job, head of an important department in a regimented, authoritarian future state, the product of a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions following a period of hardship known as the Hunger Years.  One day the colonel can't find his scissors.  Then they mysteriously turn up just where they should be, but weren't a few minutes before.  The same day, a person from the statistics department brings up the subject of "Normal Loss;" inexplicably, for many years, two percent of supplies of many types have been vanishing without a trace.

The colonel is an intelligent and thorough man, as he has needed to be to rise in the current efficiency-obsessed, rigidly organized society in which the job performance of individuals blessed with professional government positions is carefully tracked and those who fail to measure up are are coldly, even callously, demoted and sent to toil among the undifferentiated masses of common people.  The colonel methodically uses logic, research in books, and experiments to uncover a mind-blowing reality about his world--a whole tribe of people has opted out of society and live like mice in the recesses of the world via the use of psychic powers.  These people can influence a normie's brain so adeptly that  the normie can't see things right in front of him, or hear sounds, or remember this or that, etc.  The invisible people live by stealing food and other necessities, using their psychic abilities to conceal any evidence of the theft.  Can the colonel, who isn't exactly happy in this authoritarian society, join this secret parasitic society of drop outs?  After all, if he was able to detect them, he must have something in common with them; perhaps they are recruiting him, allowing him to see them?

There are some twists and turns in the plot, with the colonel falling in love with one of the invisible people and deciding to commit suicide when it looks like the invisible people have rejected him because he demoted an incompetent and incompatible subordinate, but in the end it is clear that the invisible woman who has caught his fancy is also in love with him and he joins this invisible tribe, and we readers are given the hint that the colonel will lead the invisible people in a successful effort to make society less oppressive.  "The Altruist" in basic outlines follows the old SF template of a guy in a less than ideal society getting into contact with the secret underground and having to choose whether or not to join them in reforming or overthrowing the current order.

I think this is probably the most admirable of today's four stories, but I am not in love with it.  I'm not sure Schmitz really gets the story's two themes--the theme of noticing and not noticing and avoiding notice and the theme of how we are all acting altruistically even if we don't know it--to mesh all that well; they seem to be parallel and distinct rather than complementary.  Does the altruism angle even contribute to the plot?  Does it even make sense?  Aren't the invisible people acting selfishly rather than altruistically?  Is the colonel's desire to abandon his job and leave society because he's in love with some woman he just met altruistic?

A number of events and characters in the story left me feeling similarly uneasy, at least at first, wondering what they signified, what they had to do with the story's plot or themes; I'm not sure if this reflects unclear writing on Schmitz's part or the fact that I am too dim to easily grasp Schmitz's subtlety.  Specific examples (I include these for people who have read the story--feel free to enlighten me in the comments) are the question of the relationship between the statistician and the invisible people, the feelings of the secretary for the colonel, and why the colonel thinks, erroneously, that the invisible people will no longer contact him after he demotes the troublemaker.  There's also the matter of whether the colonel really was going to commit suicide, or if it was some kind of ploy to get the attention of the invisible woman.

Again we're calling a story from Galaxy's September 1952 issue acceptable, though recognizing that this story is on the higher end of the acceptable spectrum.  "The Altruist" was reprinted in English in the 2002 collection Eternal Frontier, but if you can read the language of Moliere, Voltaire and Proust, you can enjoy "The Altruist" in a 1976 French anthology of stories about telepaths.

**********

I guess I'm feeling wishy washy today, unable to make decisive judgments of these stories.  Or maybe all four of them really are middling or competent but flawed.  Or maybe I am the flawed one, maybe I am smart enough to recognize the value of stories that lack sex and violence, but not smart enough to enjoy them.

It has been like half a dozen posts about 1950s short stories, so we'll be shifting gears for the next post; stay tuned, we may find the sex and violence our animalistic subconsciouses crave!

  
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Thursday, January 8, 2026

F&SF, June 1955: Eveyln E Smith, Charles Beaumont & Chad Oliver

Another day, another docket of stories from 1950s science fiction magazines to be judged!  Today's victims are three stories from the June 1955 issue of Anthony Boucher's F&SF.  Way back in 2018, shortly after the discovery of fire, I read the Damon Knight story in this ish, "You're Another," and explained at length why I didn't like it, though I was happy for the excuse it provided to search the interwebs for 1950s photos of women clad in tweed.  Just a few days ago we read the issue's contribution from Manly Wade Wellman, "Walk like a Mountain," and I gave it a vigorous thumbs up.  Today a woman and two men stand before us, soon to be subjected to similarly subjective and mercurial judgement--Evelyn E. Smith, Charles Beaumont, and Chad Oliver.  None can predict who will be vaunted and who will be condemned. 

I'll be reading these stories in a scan of the original magazine.  And, yes, I know there is a Derleth/Reynolds Solar Pons story in here, but I'm in no mood for that sort of gaff today.

"The Faithful Friend" by Evelyn E. Smith 

From the title alone we know to expect that Evelyn E. Smith's contribution to this issue of F&SF will test to the utmost our ability to suspend disbelief (ha ha, he laughed mirthlessly.)  I think I've read three stories by Smith.  In 2015, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, I read "Softly While You're Sleeping" and liked it.  In 2020 I read Smith's gimmicky story about crossword puzzles, "DAXBR/BAXBR" and didn't care for it.  I didn't like her locked-room mystery "Really It Was Quite Simple" when I read that in 2021, either.  One score and two misses.  Well, if I like "The Faithful Friend," today Smith can achieve equilibrium here in the merciless and dyspeptic court of MPFL.

Earth has been conquered by insectoid telepathic space aliens who spend a lot of time indulging in recreational drug use via an "inhaler."  Generations ago the aliens destroyed most of humanity, they considering humans little better than animals who were marring the beautiful Terran landscape with their industry and wars.  Some humans were retained to be bred on farms as pets and slaves, and some escaped destruction and their descendants today live a parlous existence in the wilderness, occasionally raiding the alien compounds and killing alien guards, and sometimes in turn subjected to hunts by the aliens; the aliens find life on Earth, a planet far from the main space lanes, boring and hunting the natives relieves the monotony.

The plot of "The Faithful Friend" concerns the current alien governor of Earth, an old bug, and a young diplomat who comes to our poor colonized planet.  This young bug thinks Earth a drag, but it looks like the inevitable next step of his career is to become governor of Terra after the current holder of the office dies.  This young careerist thinks maybe he can make Earth more prestigious and make himself rich by breeding a large quantity of humans and offering them for sale across the space empire as pets and servants.  The current governor hasn't done this because he likes the natives and doesn't want to see them exploited; this sentimentalist has a human servant/pet of whom he is particularly fond, one who is particularly skilled at mixing the drugs for the inhalers.

A lot of this material feels like an allegory of British imperialism, that Smith has taken inspiration from stories of how the English admired the Irish landscape and lamented that the Irish people were cluttering it up, allegations that British people hunted Australian aborigines for sport, that sort of thing.  When Smith turns our attention to scenes of wild humans who creep up on the Governor's complex with the plan of assassinating the Governor, she seems to be lampooning Americans and their conceptions of freedom and independence.  The wild humans talk about liberty, using the phrase "give me liberty or give me death" but can't articulate what freedom is or how their lives will be improved by slaying the alien governor.  The raiders manage to surprise and kill the sentries and get to the house unawares (the insectoidal aliens have poor hearing and detest the sensation of hearing sounds, and so their sleeping quarters are sound-proofed.)  The Governor's human servant, however, cannot be persuaded to join the human raiders, and he warns the Governor of the danger he is in.  The aliens' high tech weapons make short work of the wild humans, but not before the servant, the faithful friend of the title, is killed by the raiders, who of course feel betrayed by this well-fed collaborator.

The final scenes of the story are about how much the Governor misses his faithful friend (his replacement can't mix the drugs right!) and how the young diplomat schemes to, once he becomes governor himself--perhaps by murdering the current governor--annihilate the free-range humans and use the story of the faithful friend to market farm-bred humans all across the galaxy.

Sometimes these stories about how foul are English-speaking people or white people in general or just all humans offer the left-wing reader the wish fulfillment fantasy of an alien civilization of communists or hippies or tribal people to whom good lefties like the reader can flee, or who can destroy or seize control of or serve as a model for our deplorable human civilization.  But "The Faithful Friend" is 100% dark, offering no such comfort!  The aliens are bad, and so are the humans, and by fighting for theor freedom the aliens only make things worse for themselves!  Smith has crafted a sad cynical story here.

I'm biased against these anti-human, anti-Western type stories, but "The Faithful Friend" is well-written, and everything that happens is believable, so I can mildly recommend it.  It doesn't seem to have been a hit though, only ever being reprinted in the French edition of F&SF (the readers of which no doubt enjoyed the people who liberated them from Germany in their own lifetimes taken down a peg.)

"The New Sound" by Charles Beaumont 

I think this will be the seventeenth (17th!) story by Charles Beaumont I have blogged about.  Oh no, it's time for links!

"The Crooked Man"

Charles Beaumont has a high reputation, but we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are inveterate contrarians and I have slagged many of the above-linked stories based on a diverse host of criteria.  But some I have enjoyed, so maybe we'll like "The New Sound," eh?

Message from the other side: this story is OK.  A rich guy who started collecting records and then narrowed his focus down to just collecting nature sounds makes the bizarre decision to narrow his interest further and exclusively collect the sounds of animals dying.  He hires some unscrupulous characters who bring him recordings of all different kinds of animals being killed.  He moves out of the city to the country, to a house that has a view of the city, so he has more room to store his records and so people will stop calling the cops when they hear cries of pain coming from his apartment.  

Eventually, he has a sound recording of the death of every kind of animal.  So he moves on to people!  Eventually he has a huge library of the last utterances of all different kinds of men and women as they are being murdered in all different ways.  

In the story's final scene a nuclear weapon is detonated at the city, and the protagonist rushes to his window with a tape recorder and tries to record the sound of the city's destruction.

This story's basic idea isn't bad and the style is good, but the ending is kind of a let down.  Maybe this ending is inevitable, though, if we see the story as social commentary or satire--the collector of death represents humanity, he is the avatar of humanity's cruelty, callousness, and addiction to violence, and to drive this metaphor home the story has to culminate in worldwide destruction.  If the collector killed himself or was captured by the police or suffered the vengeance of his victim's relatives or something then he would just be one bad apple at odds with society, and the story wouldn't work so well as a condemnation of humanity (but would work better as a human drama.)

We'll judge "The New Sound" acceptable.

"The New Sound" can be found in Beaumont collections that promote his work as "sinister"--the US Yonder and the British The Edge--and in an anthology, I guess a college text book that presents "Social Science Fiction" entitled Above the Human Landscape.


"Artifact" by Chad Oliver

In the summer of 1971 the US government launches a secret operation, the first manned flight to Mars and back.  The astronauts bring back to this big blue marble an astonishing find--a primitive tool, a scraper made from chipped flint or something like flint, evidence that there are, or have been, intelligent beings on Mars.  The government recruits an archaeologist to join the second mission to Mars.  On Mars, he uses various archaeological techniques which Oliver, an anthropologist himself, describes in some detail, to uncover more tools of the same technological level as the scraper, things like arrow- or spear heads.  There is no evidence of houses or pottery or agriculture, and it is theorized that the native Martians never developed such things because Mars lacks natural resources.

Mars is pretty desolate, most of it an arid desert with itty bitty plants and a small population of little gopher-like mammals and an even smaller population of reptilian predators.  But there is some water near the poles.  So the expedition heads to one pole and there they meet some of the intelligent natives.  We've read many stories in which Oliver romanticizes stone-age people and their life style, and he does the same thing here.  They may not have much of anything by way of technology, but the Martians are much smarter and much nicer than Earth people, and after this has been demonstrated the story has a sense of wonder ending as the archaeologist thinks--in the vaguest possible terms--of how the Martian culture is going to have a beneficial influence on Earth and our violent civilization.

Oliver's story is pretty well-written, and the archaeological dig he depicts is pretty interesting, but the story lacks plot and character; there is very little suspense or conflict or grappling with obstacles.  The Earthers meet the Martians, the Martians are perfect, the end.  You might even call "Artifact" utopian, though Oliver doesn't offer any recipe for creating a utopia other than "if everybody is a genius and a saint, the result will be a utopia!"  Boucher, in his intro to the story here in the magazine, launches a preemptive strike on the obvious criticism of the story--that it has no real plot--by saying that "Artifact" depicts the thrill and suspense of the practice of science, of the pursuit and discovery of truth, which he claims is more exciting than a detective's pursuit of a dangerous criminal across the galaxy.  Well, if you say so.

I'm wrestling with the decision of whether to judge "Artifact" merely acceptable or conclude that it sneaks just across the line into marginally good territory, and I don't feel like I am going to resolve this dilemma.  We'll just have to be content to call it "borderline" and accept the criticism that we are wishy washy.  If you want to judge for yourself, "Artifact" can be dug up from many locations, such as the 1955 Oliver collection Another Kind, later Oliver collections, and various European magazines and anthologies.


**********

I'm not in love with any of these stories, but we've all heard that if you can't be with those you love, you should love those you are with, and none of today's stories is actually bad, so maybe we can take that advice?  All three are well written, so we have to distinguish among them based on stuff like plot and character and subject matter.  Smith's is the best story, as it has a conventional plot with characters who exhibit human emotion and because imperialism and the need for society and individuals to balance liberty and security are inherently interesting, universal topics.  Oliver's is second best, as the archaeological stuff is fun, but there is no real conflict or climax, and the characters are flat.  Beaumont is the worst, though still OK, because it is just an idea and the ending, which I guess is supposed to be shocking or say something disparaging about humanity, is weak as drama.

Still more Fifties SF when next this court is in session.
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Sunday, November 23, 2025

Crossroads in Time: C Simak, F Leiber, K MacLean, P S Miller & G O Smith

Groff Conklin's 1953 paperback anthology Crossroads in Time recently came to my attention when we read from it Hal Clement's story "Assumption Unjustified."  This volume of 312 pages is full of stories by writers we are interested in that, for one reason or another, we haven't read yet.  (I will here note that we have, in fact, already read the included story by Margaret St. Clair, "Thirsty God" as well as Clement's story.)  Today let's read from this book five stories that debuted in Astounding.  I will be reading them in a scan of this 1953 paperback with the awesome Richard Powers cover, though I may consult other versions if I suspect a typo or printing error.

"Courtesy" by Clifford D. Simak (1951)

In our last thrilling expedition into the world of magazines printed before we were born we read three stories printed in Astounding that were penned by Clifford D. Simak, the newspaperman famed for writing "pastoral" science fiction, and here's a fourth.  One of those three stories stole my heart and one of them had me tearing out my hair, so as I begin "Courtesy" I have no idea how I will react to it.

This is one of those SF stories that condemns the human race and presents goody goody aliens who are better than us to serve as a contrast to our vileness.  I'm going to call it acceptable because it is well-written and suspenseful, but the ending is a groaner.  Simak has produced a lot of fiction like this, with ants, dogs, robots all proving better than humans, and Native Americans proving better than white people, and I don't find the theme persuasive or entertaining.

"Courtesy" tells the tale of an expedition to a barren alien planet.  The expedition has twenty-five members, and we meet a few of them and Simak does a good job sketching out their personalities and relationships--like I said, this story, the theme of which and the plot resolution of which I think are crummy, is pretty well-written.  We learn that humans have explored many habitable alien planets, but everywhere they go, the natives hate the humans.  Most of the text of the story involves a guy who stupidly leaves the camp and gets lost, and then how everybody in the expedition, which won't be able to contact any other humans for two years, catches the lethal local plague because the medical officer stupidly didn't check the expedition's drugs before or soon after landing and it turns out the drugs are expired, useless.

Only one man of the 25 survives the plague, and the reason he survives reveals why all aliens hate us humies.  We humies are all arrogant and think we are better than aliens!  The aliens on this planet, naked savages with no technology or literature, have the power to cure people, and they cured the one guy who will survive the plague because he was the only human to show any common courtesy to any of the natives.

The idea that all humans would be arrogant all over the galaxy and all natives resent the humans is silly, because, as Simak seemed to know when he wrote "Ogre" in 1944, interactions between advanced colonial and imperial societies and less advanced indigenes are complex and diverse--sure, plenty of ancient Romans and early modern Europeans who went out to the provinces and colonies looked down on the natives and plenty of natives hated them in return, but significant numbers of the colonizers liked and admired the natives and even "went native" and significant numbers of natives were eager to collaborate or emulate or imitate the colonizers.

You can find this professionally produced but ultimately frustrating and sterile exercise in several anthologies as well as multiple Simak collections.


"The Mutant's Brother" by Fritz Leiber (1943)

"The Mutant's Brother" appeared in the issue of Astounding which had as its cover story C. L. Moore's Judgment Night, a book version of which we read back in 2018; the issue also includes one of A. E. van Vogt's Space Beagle stories, "M33 in Andromeda," as well as a Moore-Kuttner collab--"Endowment Policy"--and an Anthony Boucher story-- "One-Way Trip" I don't think I have read yet.  I feel like I have read lots of old SF stories, but I look at these old SF magazines and still find tons of stories I haven't read yet and want to, as well as stories I have read, like "M33 in Andromeda," and want to reread.  Even if I get a robot to do the dishes and the laundry and to help my wife with the Christmas decorations, I am never going to read all the stories I want to, am I?

"The Mutant's Brother" is a quite good hard-boiled crime story about psychic powers.  Leiber handles quite well the psychological aspects, the action scenes, and the speculative elements about how guys with psychic powers might use them, and there are horror elements as well, and the pacing and the style are just right.  Thumbs up for "The Mutant's Brother!"

It is the high tech future of the early 1970s!  Our protagonist is a mutant, a man who can work other people like puppets via hypnotic telepathy.  Or maybe it is telepathic hypnotism.  Either way, if you are within a hundred or so feet he can make you do anything, and when he stops doing it you have no memory of what happened while you were under his control.

The hero grew up an orphan, raised by good foster parents.  He has been contacted by a twin brother he has never met.  He goes to meet his twin but soon learns his twin has been using his ability to control others to commit heinous crimes.  Overconfident, evil twin has been identified and the entire police force of his city is after him.  Evil twin has lured the protagonist into the town in hopes the cops will mistake our hero for the villain and gun him down and then relax their search for the real malefactor.  Much of the length of the story consists of the hero using his power to survive in a city in which every hand is turned against him and then in a head-to-head battle of hypnotic puppet master vs hypnotic puppet master.  

The tone of the story is sad, depressing, oppressive, and nerve-wracking, with many people, including innocents and people trying to do the right thing, suffering indignities, torture, and horrible deaths.  Conklin here in Crossroads in Time spoils the ending in his intro, which is too bad because "The Mutant's Brother" is the kind of story in which you don't know who will win in the end until you actually get to the end.  

A real success.  Sometimes Leiber goes on too long, or introduces some of his boring or annoying or creepy hobbyhorses and thus weakens his stories*, but "The Mutant's Brother" is perfectly proportioned and every component is appropriate and contributes to the literary and entertainment value of the piece.

*(If you want to hear me attack Leiber stories on these grounds, check out my blog posts on "Nice Girl with Five Husbands," "A Deskful of Girls," The Night of the Wolf, and "Black Glass."  Of course, you might prefer to hear me unreservedly praise Leiber stories like "The Button Molder," "The Dreams of Albert Moreland," "Stardock," and "Ship of Shadows."  If you click the link to the blog post on "Ship of Shadows" you will also have a chance to witness me sarcastically mocking SF royalty Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon.)

To my mind it is odd that "The Mutant's Brother" has been reprinted less often than Leiber stories that are less exciting and less well-put together; in the 20th century "The Mutant's Brother" reappeared only in Crossroads in Time (and the Spanish translation of Conklin's anthology.), You can find it in two 21st-century Leiber collections, Day Dark, Night Bright and Masters of Science Fiction: Fritz Leiber, fortunately.


"Feedback" by Katherine MacLean (1951)

I enjoyed MacLean's "Unhuman Sacrifice" and "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" so I have hopes I'll enjoy this one.

Argh, this is a long tedious didactic story about how the common people are conformists who will join a witch-hunting mob on the slightest pretext, set in the America of 1991 in which democracy means conformity and posses of vigilantes regularly set upon free thinkers and lynch them.  "Feedback" features a school teacher who suffers just such a fate after encouraging his students to not conform.  MacLean describes the mob's torture of the teacher in considerable detail, and we get lots of oratory from the heroic school teacher.  There is a sort of twist ending which involves the teacher and his comrades in the secret resistance of middle-class professionals faking his death with their high technology, and a sort of joke reference to Nathan Hale's quote "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country;" I guess the joke being that the school teacher in the story has multiple "lives" to lose for anti-conformism, he being able to survive multiple lynchings by faking his death.

Seventeen pages of hectoring self-righteousness, an exercise in over-the-top manipulation and extravagant flattery of the audience, Astounding readers of course thinking themselves smarter than everybody else and dreaming of outwitting their inferiors with superior technology.  Thumbs down!

"Feedback" was reprinted in the MacLean collection The Diploids and it has also reappeared in Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander's Science Fiction of the Fifties and the German anthology Der metallene Traum.


"The Cave" by P. Schuyler Miller (1943)

"The Cave" starts out like a science article describing how caves are formed and used by animals.  The cave in this story is, however, on Mars.  After three pages of geology we hear how a native Martian, a barbarian hunter in touch with nature with a sense of smell and ability to detect vibrations that allow him to navigate with ease in total dark and interpret the moods and emotions of all the critters that live in the cave, arrives at the cave to wait out a storm.  The monsters in the cave and he silently agree to a truce for the duration of the storm.

After hearing how awesome this Martian is, even though his people don't have a written language any more, their high civilization having fallen thousands of years ago, we meet a human colonist, a working-class moron who is greedy, loves alcohol, and is racist towards the noble native Martians.  This guy, a miner, uses his free time to explore the deserts of Mars in hopes of finding some kind of treasure, even though the managers of the mining company, you know, middle-class people with book-larning, are sure the valuable minerals of Mars were all used up by the high-tech ancestors of the currently barbaric native Martians.  The storm drives him into the cave (he finds it by sheer luck) and he encounters the Martian and all the monsters in the cave.  Of course the man acts like a selfish jerk, unlike the Martian and the monsters with whom the hunter shares a code of honor, and gets killed by the noble Martian.   

This story is well-written; the plot is suspenseful and all the stuff about the cave and the native Martian ecosystem is believable and engaging, so I enjoyed this story even though it is yet another allegory about the evil white man abusing the noble indigenes who live in concert with the natural world.  (In 200 years, when the Chinese communists have conquered the Earth, will their creative class be writing stories that romanticize the English-speaking people they have crushed under their heels, the Anglo's bizarre individualism and incomprehensible notions of free speech and private property?)  So, thumbs up, even though I wish the human had come out of the cave alive, maybe gripping a fistful of jewels.

"The Cave" debuted in an issue of Astounding which also prints one of Jack Williamson's Seetee stories--one of my widely-read commentors recently recommended the Seetee stories to us.  Also in this issue, A. E. van Vogt's "The Search," which was integrated into the novel Quest for the Future and which I read in 2016, one of Anthony Boucher's Fergus O'Breen stories (we just read one of those), one of Henry Kuttner's Gallegher stories (we read one of those in 2014) and a Kuttner/Moore collaboration.  Probably we'll be coming back to this issue of Astounding.       

"The Cave" was reprinted in anthologies by Brian Aldiss, Martin H. Greenberg, and Jane Hipolito and Willis E. McNelly.


"Vocation" by George O. Smith (1945)

It looks like "Vocation" has never reappeared in physical print beyond Crossroads in Time.  Are we about to uncover a forgotten gem?  

No, we are not.  "Vocation" is merely acceptable.  

"Vocation" is full of science, but science I am having trouble taking too seriously.  The whole story is based around the idea that humans use only 10% of their brains, which I think is a myth.  Also, there is a lot of talk about evolution that anthropomorphizes nature, suggesting that nature is designing and improving the design of the human race over time, aiming to achieve some final perfect form, the way engineers design equipment and steadily improve succeeding models of the equipment.
"Nature causes many sports to be sterile because they interfere with her proper plan."
"Nature expects the brain to be called on, one hundred percent, and she intends to keep increasing that ability as it is needed."
This kind of stuff would be fine in a fantasy story or horror story, where we accept gods and the supernatural and so on, but this story feels like it is supposed to be hard SF, and this undermines that feel, and these brain and evolution issues are not a casual aside, but the entire foundation of the story.  

Another issue with "Vocation" is that it consists almost entirely of conversations, which is not that exciting.

It is the future of aircars and other such high technology.  Humans have yet to reach the stars.  The starfaring galactic civilization has made itself known to Terra, and there are two alien ambassadors on Earth, a really charming good-looking guy and his very charming and good-looking wife.  They are here to offer advice to humans, but they refuse to give away the technological secrets that will enable travel between the stars.

The plot of "Vocation" follows a few smart humans--a scientist and a journalist--who are a little skeptical of the aliens.  Why won't they give us the star drive?  Are they afraid of us because we are so aggressive and ambitious?  These guys come up with the theory that we humies only use 10% of our brains because the aliens are emitting a field upon Earth that limits our brain usage.  They start working on a device to cancel out that field, or increase the amount we can use our brains so we get closer to 100%.  The device works.  The scientist has the machine hooked up to his skull, and after a few minutes of writing supergenius-level equations on paper, he dies.  The brain is like a motor, if you run it at 100% too long it burns out.  Oops.  The journalist is just standing near the machine, and the fraction of the field that leaks out of the connections is enough to make him the smartest human on Earth, as smart as the alien ambassadors.  The best part of Smith's story is the description of the powers having a 260 IQ gives the journalist.

The journalist goes to meet the ambassador.  The journalist is smart enough now to realize the aliens are the goody goodies they present themselves as--they aren't scared of us, they aren't retarding our development, and they really are refusing to offer us the technology needed to travel between the stars on a silver platter for our own good--we haven't developed the ability to use the technology responsibly yet.  The human race will have to achieve a star drive on its own; by the time we are smart enough to invent it we'll also have naturally grown to a level of responsibility to enable us to use the tech without blowing up the sun or something.  The journalist resolves to destroy the brain-improving machine.

Smith includes a twist and sense-of-wonder ending that I think is unnecessary.  In one of those coincidences we so often find in fiction, one of the ambassadors' direct superiors happens to be visiting on the very day the journalist increases his intelligence.  The ambassador introduces the journalist to this alien if the next level up, and this guy is so intelligent it blows the journalist's mind--among their own people, the ambassadors, at 260 IQ, are morons, and are sent on this kind of mission because it is impossible for humans of a mere 100 or so IQ to communicate with an alien of average IQ.      

"Vocation" is like a filler piece, not bad, but no big deal.

**********

We think of old science fiction, in particular science fiction associated with Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr., as optimistic about science and technology and as being a celebration of the ability of man to master the environment and solve problems.  But today's five stories are all about human limitations and human evil.  I guess Astounding was serving up a pretty varied diet to readers.

More samples from that diet next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

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Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Merril-approved '58 stories by C Smith, W Stanton & J Stopa

We're in no rush here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Stop and smell the flowers, we say!  So it has been like two months since we logged an installment of our tour of the speculative fiction of 1958 courtesy of Judith Merril, the critics' favorite anthologist.  But slow and steady wins the race, and today we again turn to the back pages of my copy of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume to Merril's long list of honorable mentions and pick out three stories to read.  Our journey through 1958 is an alphabetical one, and we are still on the letter "S," and today we check out stories by Cordwainer Smith, Will Stanton and Jon Stopa.

"Western Science is So Wonderful!" by Cordwainer Smith  

Merril recommends two stories by Cordwainer Smith in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume; we read "The Burning of the Brain" back in 2019.  I recognize the title "Western Science is So Wonderful!" and am a little surprised I haven't read it yet, but maybe I put off reading it because I thought the title was sarcastic and I was in no mood for yet another slagging of the Western world after a lifetime of hearing such slaggings from college professors, grad students (the college professor in its larval form), journalists and now rapping nepo-baby mayoral candidates.  Whatever the case, today we see what this story, which debuted in Damon Knight's If and has never been anthologized but has seen reprint in many Smith collections, is all about by reading it in a scan of the appropriate issue of If.

"Western Science is So Wonderful" in fact is not an attack on Western society; the main target of its satire is actually socialism in Russia and China.  But it is also a silly and repetitive joke story.  

An exiled Martian is on Earth during the Second World War, and hangs around in rural China.  It can read minds and change its shape and effortlessly fly and so forth--it likes to take the form of a tree and feel the wind in its branches, for example.  The Martian encounters a U. S. Army liaison with the Chinese Nationalist Army and shocks the Yank and his Chinese porters with his bizarre behavior, like taking the form of the American's mother and then of a stripping Red Cross nurse in an effort to put him at ease.  One of the jokes of this sequence is that the Martian is fascinated by the American's cigarette lighter.  (It is this device that prompts the utterance that serves as the story title.)  The Martian erases all memory of this encounter from the soldier and those who accompany him.

In 1955 a Soviet liaison to the Chinese Communist Party arrives in the same spot and the Martian interacts with him and the Chinese people accompanying him.  The alien makes many comical efforts to make friends with these commies, like appearing as Chairman Mao and then a sexy Russian WAC and asking to join the Chinese Communist Party, and the commies respond comically by, for example, saying he must be a supernatural entity and thus must not exist because, as militant atheists, they believe the supernatural does not exist.  Eventually the Soviet and the Chinese officers convince the Martian to go to the United States, where people are religious and will believe in him, and where much of the Western science he so admires comes from.  This plot-light shaggy dog story ends when the Martian teleports itself to night time Connecticut and decides to take the form of a milk delivery truck made of gold.

I like that the story is largely a spoof of communism, and the jokes aren't terrible, but "Western Science is So Wonderful!" is still a waste of time and, though it pains me because I have been impressed by a lot of Smith's work, I have to give this production of Smith's a marginal thumbs down.

"Over the River to What's-Her-Name's House" by Will Stanton

Stanton has eighteen story credits at isfdb, and wikipedia is telling me he published hundreds of humor stories and essays in mainstream outlets like Reader's Digest, The New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post.  As I tell you every time I do one of these Merril-inspired posts, Merril was skeptical or even hostile to genre distinctions and loved to promote as SF stories by mainstream writers whether they appeared in dedicated SF venues or mainstream ones.  As it happens, "Over the River to What's-Her-Name's House" debuted in F&SF.  The only evidence of reprinting I can find is in the British edition of Venture, but I didn't put a lot of effort into searching for reprints because it turns out there are a lot of Will Stantons out there and I didn't feel like sifting through all the pages that came up that were obviously not applicable.

"Over the River to What's-Her-Name's House" is a sleep-inducing satire of suburban life in the mid-century, a slice of life story about the future when there are lots of labor saving devices and lots of collective institutions that take up people's time (for example, farcical versions of the Book-of-the-Month Club--the Trivet of the Month Club and the Sick Friend of the Month Club--and of women's charitable groups) and lots of self-help rituals to ease stress endorsed by Ivy League professors.  My eyes kept glazing over as I tried to read this sterile and vacuous ooze and maybe that is why I was unable to detect any plot--maybe the plot was about how the many mechanical and social systems designed to make life easier were in fact making life less satisfying and were breaking down anyway. 

Absolute waste of time--this hunk of junk makes the Cordwainer Smith story I just condemned as a waste of time look like a brilliant masterpiece fashioned by a hero.  Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, all is forgiven!

"A Pair of Glasses" by Jon Stopa

Stopa has only four fiction credits at isfdb but was apparently an enthusiastic participant in fan activities--he and his wife won an award at a convention for their skimpy costumes (or was the award really for their slender bodies?)--and in the production of nonfiction books about SF--he is credited with the competent if not inspired covers for many books of essays about SF including Damon Knight's famous In Search of Wonder.

This is a tedious story in which two old guys living in a post-apocalyptic world smoke pipes and have boring philosophical arguments, referring to Sigmund Freud, David Hume, and Herman Hesse.  In "A Pair of Glasses" Stopa contrasts those who, seeing the world is full of danger and confusion, retreat from the workaday world like monks to contemplate the spiritual world or like college professors to study sterile minutia, with those who engage with the world, try to meet its challenges and make it a better place for mankind.  Stopa also includes descriptions of glass blowing and of the work of the optometrist and optician.

Ben, who is fat, and Roger, who is thin, were friends as kids.  Mankind had exhausted the resources of the Earth, the oil and coal and iron and all that.  Then a terrible war erupted.  Now there is almost no industry or technology, and the military consists of archers.  Ben retreated to a valley in California to found a colony of people who focused on getting in touch with nature and the infinite.  Roger, on Lake Michigan, started a glass blowing shop to help rebuild modern civilization.  Now they are old men, and Ben has walked to Roger's place in response to a letter from Rog in which Rog told him he could provide his old pal with a pair of spectacles.  Obviously this is a metaphor; Roger is trying to help Ben see physically as well as intellectually--Ben even exhibits reluctance to wear the glasses, as they are uncomfortable and all the detail is confusing, a parallel to the willful blindness that led him to hide from life and reality in California.

The men have their boring debates, Stopa wasting our time with descriptions of their drinking lemonade and looking out over the lake and filling their pipes with tobacco and so forth.  

The twist ending is that, while Ben was isolated in his California colony, people in the outside world developed their innate psychic abilities and can now teleport.  The scientific method and engagement with the broader world are vindicated and the monkish life shown to be a dead end.  Somehow, while walking from California through Colorado to Illinois or Wisconsin or wherever Roger's glass works is, Ben never noticed anybody teleporting.  A little hard to believe.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  I sympathize with its ideology, but "A Pair of Glasses" is boring and the twist ending is unacceptable.  I don't think this thing has ever been reprinted after debuting in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding.  

**********

Oy, three losers!  Judith Merril did us dirty this time around!  What can we salvage from the wreckage?  Well, each of these stories is a sort of time capsule of 1950s concerns; communism in Russia and China is a major theme of Smith's story and a minor theme of Stopa's, and Stanton's unreadable tub of goop is, I guess, a satire of life at the time it was written.  Stopa's story perhaps reflects the ideology and interests of the segment of the SF world which orbited around Campbell--pro-science, anti-religion, fascinated with psionic powers.  So, maybe these stories have value for the student of social and cultural history.  But entertainment value is very limited.    

We'll be back on the sex and violence beat next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log, folks!
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Thursday, June 26, 2025

Strange Ports of Call: D H Keller, H Wandrei, and C A Smith

In 1948 Pellegrini and Cudahy published a 400-page hardcover anthology bearing the legend "20 Masterpieces of Science Fiction" on cover and spine alongside the title Strange Ports of Call.  Strange Ports of Call was edited by the tireless August Derleth, correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft and major figure in the effort to get weird material printed in book form, and this volume is full of stories by people we associate with Weird Tales.  Let's read three stories from Strange Ports of Call by weirdies today, those by David H. Keller, Howard Wandrei, and Clark Ashton Smith.  (We may read more from this book in the future, stories by people less closely associated with the weird.)

But before all that, let's list the seven stories reprinted in Strange Ports of Call that we have already read in other venues.


(Nota Bene: I will be reading all of today's stories in a scan of Strange Ports of Call, though I may check original magazine versions, or other reprints, if there are confusing typos or printing errors.)

"The Worm" by David H. Keller (1929)

We start with a story that has been reprinted many times after its debut in Amazing, including in a Best of Amazing anthology in 1967 and in two different issues of Fantastic, one in 1965 and one in 1979.  The cover of the '79 issue promotes "The Worm" as "Probably the most intriguing tale you'll ever read anywhere."  Wow!

For centuries Thompson's Valley, Vermont, was a prosperous village, with productive farms and a busy mill, but today the place is deserted, only the miller remaining, the mill still turning, though there is no corn for it to grind.  The miller is a recluse, his only friends his books and his dog, and mechanically minded; he has hooked the mill mechanism up to generate electricity.  This practical engineering ability is put to the test when appears an uncanny threat to the building in which his family has lived and worked for generation after generation.

The monster plot of "The Worm" has some similarity to Ray Bradbury's 1951 "The Fog Horn."  The grinding of the mill has attracted a monstrous worm, a thing thirty feet thick, and it burrows up to the mill, thinking the sound of the mill is the sound of a worm of the opposite sex!  Slowly, over the course of days, the mega-sized worm chews through the foundation of the mill and then up through the building's multiple floors, all the while the miller essaying various means to stop or destroy the monster in his determination to preserve his ancestral home.  Who will win, man or beast? 

"The Worm" has something of the ethic or ideology we see in lots of early science fiction.  One man, alone, relies on his wits, sangfroid and knowledge of science and engineering as he struggles against a novel, alien, challenge.  Keller may be subverting the expectations of science lovers who see man as equal to the task of mastering the natural world, though, when he has the man fall before the monster; Keller even specifically has the miller gain confidence, in the event unfounded, from reflecting that as a man he has "brains" and the worm is just a "thing."

"The Worm" is well written, Keller producing sharp images and ably using the reactions of the dog to generate emotional content--suspense and fear--and I was actually a little surprised that the worm killed the miller instead of the other way round.  So thumbs up for "The Worm," a good science fiction horror story.

Stephen Fabian fans should check out the July '79 issue of 
Fantastic which features six pages of art by Fabian: knights, galleys, 
churning waves, a topless woman--some of your favorite things! 

"The God-Box" by Howard Wandrei (1934)

A few years ago I purchased the recent Howard Wandrei collections Time Burial: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei (1995) and The Eerie Mr. Murphy: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei: Volume II (2003) largely because I was captivated by H. Wandrei's grotesque drawings.  I did read some stories from these books, among them "For Murderers Only," "The Molester," "Danger: Quicksand" and "The African Trick," but have left many more unread.  "The God Box" (no hyphen) appears in my 2017 paperback edition of Time Burial, but I am reading it today in Strange Ports of Call, where, for whatever reason, the hyphen was introduced.  (There is no hyphen in the title where the story was first printed, under a pseudonym, in F. Orlin Tremaine's Astounding.)

Like Keller's "The Worm," H. Wandrei's "The God-Box" stars smart knowledgeable guys who employ their wits in dealing with an alien challenge, and perhaps reflecting the author's weird sensibilities, in the end they come up short and are overwhelmed--like Keller's, Wandrei's tale is not of the triumph of the man of science but a sort of horror story.

Pence is an Egyptologist who, by bizarre coincidence, discovers in New York City a box the size of a camera made of what looks like gold but is incredibly hard and astoundingly dense--the little box weighs a ton or more!  Elaborately carved with Egyptian motifs and characters, the box is studded with many little heads of pharaohs and of gods of the Egyptian pantheon.  Pence contacts an engineer with a good reputation in the scientific community and the two of them tinker with the box, begin unraveling the secrets of its mind-boggling powers.  After activating the box by charging it with electricity, they find that manipulation of the heads, which are like knobs, allows them to view as through a TV any spot in the universe!  They can even create portals through which they can instantaneously travel to those distant locales or just manipulate the matter there, moving things and people around, drawing them to New York, or destroying them.  The Egyptian box has conferred upon them god-like power!

One of the odd wrinkles of using the box is that it attracts cats from all over the city to the building in which Pence found it, and the felines become such a nuisance that the men have to use the box's powers to dispose of them by the thousands.

Pence and the engineer are clever men but not necessarily good men, and Pence in particular lets his newfound powers go to his head.  The box is used to commit many trespasses, some even worse than teleporting felines wholesale out of the greatest city in the world, and eventually the men scheme against each other and end up lost on a distant planet.

I didn't like the style of this one as much as that of Keller's, it being a little flippant and jokey rather than sharp and clear, but I'm still giving "The God-Box" a thumbs up.  The premise of Damon Knight's 1976 "I See You" bears some similarity to that of "The God-Box," and Carl Jacobi's 1954 "Made in Tanganyika," has not only a similar premise but a similar plot.  Were Jacobi and Knight influenced by Wandrei's story?

"Master of the Asteroid" by Clark Ashton Smith (1932)

I'm a little surprised I haven't read this one yet, I having read quite a volume of stories by Smith.  "Master of the Asteroid" debuted in Wonder Stories, as the cover story, in the same issue as Hazel Heald's collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft "Man of Stone," which we read in 2017.

The editor's intro to "Master of the Asteroid" in Wonder Stories tells us Smith's tale focuses on the psychological stress astronauts will face.  Sure enough, the protagonists of the story are three men who, as members of a scientific expedition on Mars consisting of fifteen men, go insane and steal one of the expedition's ships and try to fly through the asteroid belt to a moon of Jupiter without bringing enough supplies with them.  After a sort of preface or frame, we get to the meat of the story, the log discovered decades later aboard the stolen vessel where it lies wrecked on an asteroid; also found inside the ship was the skeleton of one of the three mutineers, while around the ship lay the remains of a bunch of grotesquely skinny insectoid aliens.

In brief, the narrator survives while the other two madmen expire during the trip.  The narrator goes catatonic but recovers when the vessel crashes into a large asteroid which actually has an atmosphere and a whole ecosystem of plants, animals and people who have a culture that, apparently, includes religion.  The ship is all bent so the narrator cannot open the airlock, and he lacks the weapons or tools to bust through the porthole or hull, so he is stuck in the ship, and learns all about life on the asteroid by watching through the porthole.  We get a description of that life, and the man's mental trials, then finally clues as to the uncanny cause of his death.

"Master of the Asteroid" is a very good horror story set in space.  The style is direct though not unadorned, and totally believable as the record of a man under terrible stress.  The behavior and psychologies of the three broken men are very convincing and striking, and the story is full of dreadful, even haunting, images and events.  Yet again Clark Ashton Smith proves he deserves his high reputation.

Recommended.

"Master of the Asteroid" has been reprinted quite a number of times over the years.  In 1964 it appeared in Arkham House's Smith collection Tales of Science and Sorcery, which our French friends retitled Morthylla and put out in translation in 1989 with an ooo la la cover.  (Those Frenchies know how to separate a man from his francs.)


**********

Three good stories, so kudos to the authors and to Derleth, who selected these pieces.  All three stories have the trappings of science fiction, but instead of celebrating the work of the scientist and engineer and vindicating the ability of man to solve problems and master his environment, these stories exhibit a weird sensibility.  The focus is on the horror of the alien, the danger presented by novel conditions, and the inability of humans, even those devoted to the scientific method, to survive the physical threats, solve the mysteries, and resist the temptations presented by alien beings, artifacts and conditions.  You can't handle the truth of the unknown, man--it will destroy you physically, shatter you psychologically, and tempt you into abandoning your morality!   
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