MPorcius Fiction Log: lesser

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Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Amazing Stories, July 1968: Edmond Hamilton, Milton Lesser and Paul Fairman

In our last episode we read a 1926 Weird Tales serial by Edmond Hamilton, "Across Space," and it came to our attention that in 2015 "Across Space" was reprinted in an Italian paperback omnibus along with another Hamilton tale, 1929's "Locked Worlds." "Locked Worlds" debuted in Amazing Stories Quarterly and was reprinted in Amazing Stories almost forty years later. Let's take a look at that 1968 issue of Amazing, an issue produced in the brief period when that magazine was edited by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld fame.

Despite Harrison's protests, publisher Sol Cohen's policy during this difficult time in Amazing's long life was to devote most of Amazing's page count to reprints of stories that had appeared earlier in the magazine (or its sister publication Fantastic) and it looks like this attitude extended even to the covers--the cover illo of this July 1968 issue is a mediocrity that had appeared first on the cover of a German magazine four years earlier! Is this the behavior of the "World's Leading Science-Fiction Magazine"? Sad!

Harrison starts the issue off with an editorial about developments in the SF field that I confess I found to be a little vague and all over the place; he tackles many ideas and provides a minimum of supporting evidence (but throws in various personal notes) when I would have preferred he address a small number of ideas directly and clearly. Harrison suggests the avant garde of SF (he offers his drinking buddy J. G. Ballard as its exemplar) can be described as "subjective," in contrast to old-fashioned SF which is "objective." A subjective "new wave" story emphasizes not what the story is "objectively" about--what physically happens in the story--but rather what is going on in the "inner space" that is the minds of the story's characters, or the mind of the author writing the story. He argues that what such Ballard stories as "Terminal Beach" and "End-Game" are truly about is guilt.

Harrison's editorial is not only descriptive, but proscriptive, and he warns against two trends in SF that he does not like: 1) the "vacuous" and "cliched" adventure story full of "standard props" like "blasters" and "starships" that has no plot other than violence and no meaning or wit; and 2) the overly complex or opaque story that uses experimental methods that inhibit rather than facilitate communication and whose writers import from literary fiction a snobbish "ivory tower" attitude.

Look at the frightening example of James Ballard and see what can happen. His latest works are almost unreadable and incomprehensible, the direct opposite of his earlier magnificent efforts.
I find these kind of controversial statements provocative and exciting, but their value--especially to those of us reading them 55 years later--is severely diminished by the fact that Harrison didn't offer examples of vacuous adventure stories full of violence and didn't specify which Ballard stories are allegedly "unreadable."

More controversy is to be found in the book review column, in which Leroy Tanner attacks Algis Budrys, and in the letters column, in which Ted White attacks Tanner in response to Tanner's earlier attack on Roger Zelazny. (If you are looking in the pages of Amazing for some brotherly love, Poul Anderson gushes about an Isaac Asimov collection, Asimov's Mysteries. If you are looking for boredom, there is Brian Aldiss' two pages about a trip to Oslo--Aldiss met a bunch of fun and interesting guys in Norway, but doesn't tell us anything fun or interesting about them.)

Alright, let's look at some of the fiction in this issue of Amazing. There is actually a new story, one by by "Samuel R. Delaney," a man better known as "Samuel R. Delany," but I think it is a portion of the novel Nova, a novel I read in the period before the birth of this blog and so I am passing it by. We'll turn our eye to three of the reprints: Hamilton's 1929 "Locked Worlds" and one story each by Milton Lesser and Paul Fairman first published in the 1950s. (Note that I am reading all three in their 1968 printings--this may have been a mistake, as I ran into quite a lot of typos.)

"Locked Worlds" by Edmond Hamilton (1929)

"Locked Worlds" is the account of Harker, an English professor employed by Northeastern University. As the story begins, the most famous academic at NEU is the 30-something physicist Adams, a man universally recognized by those in his field as a top innovator, an actual revolutionary, but unpopular for his bitter sarcastic tongue and arrogant nature. After explaining to us what atoms and electrons are, Harker describes the controversial theory put forward by Adams that sets the story's plot in motion in more ways than one. These long repetitive science lectures may have some readers longing for the "standard props" and violence that Harrison was complaining about in his editorial (such readers' patience will be rewarded.)

In brief, Adams has discovered that the atoms in our universe all have two sets of electrons that move in opposite directions around the same nucleus and are dissimilar in number. This means (he says) that all the matter in our universe exists simultaneously in two different worlds that occupy the same space but are invisible to each other, and that atoms of one element in one world are a different element in the other world. If we can manipulate these electrons and reverse their courses we can travel between these two parallel worlds--the matter that is a person in this world can be sent to the other world, and in its place will appear in this world an equal number of atoms that are rocks or trees or whatever from the other world.

The matter that is the scientists of this world find Adam's theory, known colloquially as the "interlocking atoms" theory, so ludicrous that Adams' formerly high reputation is dashed and he becomes the target of ridicule, so much so that his position as head of the NEU physics dept is threatened. Adams then disappears, leaving behind a cryptic note. Weeks later, Adams' assistant Rawlins, the narrator's friend, reveals that he has been examining the apparatus found in Adams' lab and believes Adams transposed himself into the parallel world described in his theory...and probably is planning to inflict a monstrous vengeance on this world whose inhabitants ridiculed him! Newspaper stories about people in remote areas like Iowa and Suriname reporting the disappearance of geographical features and the appearance in their place of some never-before-seen soil add meat to Rawlins' suspicions. Rawlins and Harker decide they must follow Adams into that parallel world in order to stop him from launching some kind of attack on our own.

"Locked Worlds" is like 48 pages long, and after a dozen pages of all that sciency background stuff we get to the adventure portion as R & H find themselves in a world of mobile vegetation grazing low-nutrient blue soil under a blinding blue white sun, a world of spider people armed with disintegrator ray guns and anti-grav sleds that fly by managing the sleds' repulsion from and attraction to the planet's magnetic poles. The college professors don't get to explore on their own much, but are rather provided a tightly controlled guided tour by the spider men who immediately capture them and take them to a city of thousand-foot high conical buildings connected by a highway of cables so the city resembles a huge spider web. Adams the vengeful scientist has allied himself to the spider people, promised to transport them to Earth--a more fertile world than this infertile blue world--where they can conquer us. Adams has Rawlins imprisoned in the city's central building, intent on forcing him to act as his here as on Earth, assistant, and leaves Harker to the tender mercies of the spider people, who imprison him in a nearby tower, in the same cell as a bird man.

This bird man, Nor-Kan, teaches Harker his speech, and schools him in the history of this world. The bird people built a high-tech civilization, but generations ago became lazy and so bred from mindless natural spiders a servant race of giant intelligent spider people to do all their work for them. In due course, the spider people overthrew their masters and took over most of the world--a small remnant of the bird people still holds out in a fortress on the south pole. (As did the slave race in that last Hamilton story we read, "Across Space," the spider people in "Locked Worlds" remind us of the shoggoths of Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness and are perhaps a warning against becoming reliant on machines and/or the labor of other ethnic groups that might have reason to resent you or ovet your position.)

Nor-Kan and Harker escape their cell and climb up the side of the conical skyscraper in which is located the prison and then go hand over hand to the HQ building where are to be found Adams and Rawlins. While Harker frees Rawlins and makes an abortive effort to capture Adams, Nor-Kan retrieves the flying machine he was piloting when he got captured. The three barely escape after a bloody fight and fly south to the bird city at the pole, narrowly evading pursuit by spider-creature aircraft.

The bird-people are easily convinced to launch an attack on the spider-city where Adams is almost finished creating the machines to transport spider cities and spider armies to our Earth, because if the eight-legged fiends conquer Earth, they can just go to Earth's South Pole and Adams can transport them behind the impregnable walls of the bird-city. The last ten pages or so of "Locked Worlds" concern the bird attack on the spider capital, a long naval battle in the air between two air fleets of over a thousand vessels each that climaxes with a hand to hand struggle between Adams and Rawlins on the apex of a conical tower over the controls of a machine that will either transport the spider horde to our Earth or exterminate the entire spider race. After the two-legs-good, eight-legs-bad ending, Harker and Rawlins return to an Earth that has no idea how close it came to being conquered by ray gun wielding arachnids.

Though it gets off to a slow start with its repetitive lectures about electrons, I'm giving "Locked Worlds" a grade of moderately good. It has many similarities to "Across Space," which I judged as simply acceptable, but has many advantages over that 1926 story. It has an interesting villain, for one thing, and he spider city is also better than the subterranean city of "Across Space"'s Martian colonists. I enjoyed the long sequence covering the escape from the prison and then the aerial chase to the polar city, as well as all the different fun types of high-tech artillery and defense measures with which Hamilton armed the two alien war fleets.

Like "Across Space," "Locked Worlds" would be reprinted by Haffner Press and by the Italian publisher Edizioni Della Vigna in our own 21st century.

"The Impossible Weapon" by Milton Lesser (1952)

It looks like we've covered four short stories by Lesser on ye olde blogge, "'A' as in Android," "The Graveyard of Space," "Ennui," and "It's Raining Frogs!"; I read his fix-up novel Secret of the Black Planet before I started this blog. According to my notes I thought Secret of the Black Planet "bland and forgettable" and the links above attest to the fact that I was not terribly enthusiastic about those four stories, but maybe this one, "The Impossible Weapon" will be more exciting. Hope springs eternal, people.

The writing style Lesser employs for "The Impossible Weapon" reminded me of that we find in hard-boiled or noirish detective fiction, bitterly, cynically jokey in a way that exposes human frailty. You science nerds don't have to worry, though--Lesser manages to integrate some science lectures about atoms and the behavior of light into his text.

Earth is at war with the Venus-Mars-Ganymede League, a war which started with a nuclear sneak attack on this big blue marble of ours. Earth's fleet was defeating the enemy fleet when the Leaguers whipped out a new weapon, one that could penetrate any Earth forcefield. Now that Earth's ships and surface are defenseless, it looks like we may have to sue for peace with the villains of the League.

Stanley Stokes is a "quantum technician," and he thinks he knows how to nullify the League's new weapon. His fiancé is the daughter of the United Nations' Assistant Secretary of Defense Weapons, Spatial Division, and he gets an interview with this bureaucrat, but the paper pusher considers Stokes' idea to be crazy. When Stokes gets drunk and complains about her father to his fiancé, she calls off their engagement.

Stokes goes to a bar frequented by spacemen, meets a big hulking brute of a spacer, a guy who fights in bar brawls on the regular and even rumbles with the cops. This veteran sailor of the void between the planets, O'Hanrohan (of course this dude is Irish), wants to take the fight to the League, and so is willing to join forces with Stokes in a desperate effort to illegally acquire a space ship and the necessary supplies to test Stokes' theory out beyond Earth orbit, in the teeth of the enemy. Our heroes hold off the police, get their stolen ship into orbit, and prove that Stokes has developed a way to counteract the League ray weapon, making them heroes and getting Stokes' girl to agree to marry him after all.

A little slight, but a fun story; Lesser's jokes actually work, and the humor and the science lectures don't overwhelm or distract from the plot but actually support it. Thumbs up for "The Impossible Weapon." Besides in its two appearances in Amazing, you can find "The Impossible Weapon" in the 2013 collection 'A' as in Android.

"This is My Son" by Paul W. Fairman (1955)

I have little familiarity with Fairman's work; looking at the regular sources on line (isfdb, wikipedia, the internet archive) it seems Fairman was a prolific writer who had his hand in many genres, including science fiction, westerns, detective stories, novelizations of TV sitcoms I have never seen like Bridget Loves Bernie and That Girl and even soft core porn spoofs--isfdb credits Fairman with five titles in the series The Man from S.T.U.D.; two sample titles: The Orgy at Madam Dracula's and Rape is a No-No. Much of Fairman's work appeared under pen names, including the only thing I think I have read by him, the novel Whom the Gods Would Slay which debuted in Amazing and would be published as a paperback with a Jeff Jones cover. I liked Whom the Gods Would Slay so maybe I'll like "This is My Son," which debuted in Fantastic, as well.

It is the 2030s. John Temple is a young American physicist working on a major contract down in Latin America--this super duper important job requires that he spend six continuous years on the job site and not return home to the USA even once. He can talk to his wife and kid on the video phone, but that doesn't seem like enough, and again and again his colleagues have to talk him out of breaking the contract and rushing back to his family and thus ruining his career.

Temple, as a college student and early post-grad, wanted more than anything to have a son. After marrying an attractive woman, Jill, he was very disappointed to find the two of them couldn't seem to have a child, even after two years of trying. When the Latin American opportunity came up--a six-year job which would yield enough money on completion of the contract to set them up for life--he only took it because he had no child--if he'd had a child he would have been unable to part from it. Poor Jill realized this and was broken-hearted because she loved her husband for himself, and it was now clear he primarily saw her as a potential mother.

Amazingly, only a few months after he has arrived in South America, Jill tells Temple she is pregnant. It is a hard six years, but eventually Temple gets back home to live with his family. Everybody is happy until by chance Temple learns the truth--John, Jr. is not his biological son! Wanting Temple to love her, Jill purchased a bespoke artificial baby--an android--designed and conceived in a lab and has been passing it off as their natural son! Temple calls the kid a monster to his innocent little face and John and Jill immediately separate. For years Temple lives a life of gambling and womanizing, all the while sending to his estranged family all the money they might need. Then one day he sees in the paper that his son at private school has been severely injured while rescuing his classmates during a fire. John, Jr. is a hero, hovering on the brink of death! Temple rushes to the hospital and gives his son a blood transfusion, so that, in a way, he becomes his true flesh and blood, and we are led to believe that John, Jill, and John, Jr. will live together happily ever after.

A pleasant little human interest story that explores how new technology might affect family life; we might even call this a pro-diversity story that argues that there are all different kinds of families and the traditional way of creating a family is no better than other less typical ways. Naysayers might argue this is not really a SF story, but a redecorated mainstream story about adoption, the way those same naysayers will tell you space operas and planetary romances and Jack Vance's revenge drama The Demon Princes are just redecorated westerns or detective stories or adventure tales about Western adventurers in the mysterious East. These analyses are appropriate, but do nothing to detract from a story's literary or entertainment value, and do not stop me from giving "This is My Son" a thumbs up.

I like it, but it seems that after its second appearance here in Amazing that "This is My Son" has never been reprinted.

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It is understandable that members of the SF community in 1968, especially professionals like Harry Harrison, would want to read or work for a magazine that printed brand new stories and not a bunch of reprints. But the three reprints we read today are pretty good! The Hamilton and Lesser stories are solid classic SF about scientists who invent paradigm-shifting devices and get mixed up in wars in which people discharge a dizzying array of energy weapons at each other. And the Fairman actually has mainstream literary elements like those we expect a New Wave "inner space" story to have--it is about the psychology and relationships of three people, and about how new technology shifts paradigms not in the realms of war or transportation, but the world of the family. To me, this seems like a pretty rewarding issue of Amazing.

More 1950s SF in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Sunday, September 11, 2022

Imagination, December 1950: John Wyndham, Mack Reynolds and Milton Lesser

As readers of my twitter feed may remember, I bought a book of posters of art from pulp magazines in August. In September I chose four of these posters to tack up here in MPorcius HQ: a Hannes Bok illustration of H. P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model;" Margaret Brundage's cover of the issue of Weird Tales with Clark Ashton Smith's "The Empire of the Necromancers" (one of the best of Brundage's productions;) Virgil Finlay's cover of the July 1942 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries; and Harold McCauley's cover for the December 1950 issue of Imagination. It seemed appropriate to have actually read something connected to each of the four images, and so today we tackle three stories from that 1950 issue of Imagination, a magazine then edited by Raymond Palmer. I'm reading these stories, all by people we have talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log before, in the scan of the original issue of Madge (as we fans call Imagination) available at my favorite website and yours, the internet archive.

"Technical Slip" by John Wyndham

John Wyndham, famous author of Day of the Triffids and Re-Birth AKA The Chrysalids, bore the legal name John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, and "Technical Slip" appears here in Imagination under the name John Beynon. The story would reappear four years later in the Wyndham collection Jizzle, and the next year after that in a paperback anthology by Groff Conklin which I own, Operation Future, and have already blogged a little about. I didn't read "Technical Slip" when I sampled the contents of Operation Future back in 2017, maybe because Re-Birth had rubbed me the wrong way, maybe because I didn't recognize Wyndham under that disguise.

"Technical Slip" is one of those stories about a guy selling his soul to the devil, and also a time travel story. It is well-written, but underwhelming and ends up feeling trifling.

Our dude is a 60-year-old Englishman, on his death bed. He sadly reflects that all the wisdom he has acquired over a long and successful career is about to vanish. Then a guy appears whom we are obliquely obliged to understand is a representative of the devil, though the devil in this story seems more like the manager of the bureaucracy that maintains the universe than a malevolent figure. Having adapted to the rise of the market economy, these bureaucrats no longer barter boons for souls, but sell their wares for money. After the hero agrees to hand over a large fraction of his wealth he is given a chance to live his live over again, and finds himself seven years old again, back in 1910, but with all his memories intact. Wyndham does a good job describing the world of 1910 through the hero's eyes, and of depicting the sadness of seeing his little sister, knowing she will soon be crippled for life in an accident, seeing his father and knowing in a few years he will be killed fighting in the war, and seeing his uncle and knowing the financial disaster unk is going to be responsible for. Wyndham succeeds in painting both a striking visual landscape and a moving emotional landscape here and is to be commended for doing so--all this stuff rang true to me.

The hero wonders if he can use his knowledge of the future to his advantage, and the advantage of the world--could he perhaps prevent or shorten the World Wars? His test case is his sister, and when he saves her from the accident which, in his first go round of life crippled her, he has proof that he really can change history! But then the bureaucrats step in and weaken the protagonist's hold on his memory; their failure to do so initially is the "technical slip" of the title. Our protagonist forgets he has lived through the tumultuous first half of the 20th century before and his efforts to alter history for the better are quashed.

I felt like the plot sort of fizzled out, but Wyndham's technique in that middle section of the story when our hero is back in 1910 as a kid and retains his 1960s knowledge, is quite good; "Technical Slip" is better than most deal-with-the-devil stories and does something more literary with the idea of time travel than do most time travel stories. So, I'll give it a moderate recommendation.

"Tourists to Terra" by Mack Reynolds

Reynolds had a remarkably strange and diverse career as a radical leftist activist, a travel writer for men's magazines, and a SF writer whose work I generally dislike (check out the links for my past comments on some of these topics.)

"Tourists to Terra" is a brief gimmicky story. Life on an alien planet has become too easy, too luxurious, driving wealthy individuals to seek new thrills. One of the extravagant pastimes their advanced technology has made possible is travelling to primitive planets like our Earth to participate in wars among the natives. The early scenes of "Tourists to Terra" the story depict these aliens--who look just like Earth people and equip themselves with anti-grav devices and special armor and weapons--fighting in the Trojan War, Reynolds rehearsing the scene from Book V of the Iliad in which Diomedes injures Aphrodite. (This is one of the numerous SF stories that offers a theory of the source of some ancient myth, legend or religious belief.)

The complaints of the beautiful woman who will be the germ of the Greek goddess of love over getting hit by a spear convince the people running the space cruise that it would be safer to get their customers involved not in hand-to-hand combat but in a war fought with firearms in which they can act as snipers, killing natives from a distance from a place of concealment. (These aliens think of us as no more than game animals.) These aliens have the ability to not only efficiently travel between the stars, but through time, so the ship's crew crosses the eons to 1945 in search of a war affording opportunities for safe sport. But our Earth technology has advanced faster than they anticipated, and by chance their ship materializes at an atomic bomb test site just moments before the detonation--the thrill-seeking aliens and their space ship are totally annihilated.

This disposable bit of ephemera would not be reprinted until 2011.

"It's Raining Frogs!" by Milton Lesser

This will be the fourth story by Lesser we have read here at MPorcius Fiction Log. Feel free to feast your glazzies on my scribblings about "'A' as in 'Android'," "The Graveyard of Space" and "Ennui."

"It's Raining Frogs!" begins with an epigraph from Charles Fort's Lo! Fort apparently loomed large in the minds of SF writers and fans in the middle of the 20th century--Lo! was serialized in Astounding in the early Thirties when F. Orlin Tremaine was editor, Tremaine's successor John W. Campbell, Jr. recommended Fort's collections of questionable reports of unusual phenomena as source material, Eric Frank Russell praised Fort highly, Damon Knight wrote a biography of Fort, and so on. The epigraph here mentions frogs, Fort arguing that all the universe shares a single existence, so you can study the entire whole from any starting point, be it economics, the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, or frogs.

Myra is a beautiful, intelligent and athletic woman, and an enthusiastic fan of Fort and student of Fortean phenomena. She is married to George, a mediocrity in the looks and career department, but something special anyway--he is what Myra calls a "catalyst," a man who attracts Fortean phenomena. When he rolls large numbers of dice the totals do not follow normal bell curve expectations, and sometimes frogs and other small creatures start falling from the sky upon him, spontaneously. The main plot of this story concerns how George, unwittingly, summons a man from another dimension, and not just any man, but the King of the Fourth Dimension. Like George, this alien monarch (who looks exactly like an Earth man) is married to a woman who dominates him, something he is quick to tell George and Myra.

This king from the Fourth Dimension and Myra have a longish conversation about the physics of two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and four-dimensional universes, but eventually His Majesty gets worried his wife will be angry if he isn't home soon, and wants to leave, but he can only return to his universe with the permission of George, who summoned him. George refuses, Myra insists, and in response to George's intransigence she starts hitting him--it is hinted that this sort of spousal abuse is a normal feature of their married life. For the first time after years of marriage, George asserts himself; he outwrestles Myra and spanks her, breaking her will and becoming master of his home.

The Queen of the Fourth dimension arrives, and tries to dominate the situation by seducing George; she also sets about using her alien powers to steal a fortune in jewels from Earth to take back home. George not only stands up to her but his example inspires the King to stand up for himself and become master of his relationship. The stolen jewels are returned to their rightful owners and everybody lives happily ever after in both our dimension and the Fourth now that these troublesome hot women know their place.

Obviously a story which suggests that women are selfish and greedy and that specimens of the weaker sex who are intelligent and attractive will use their brains and looks to run roughshod over everybody if a man doesn't firmly assert dominance over them runs counter to the values we in 2022 all hold dear or at least pretend to ascribe to if we know what is good for us. Putting that hot potato aside, "It's Raining Frogs" is too long and repetitive, and the mechanism of how George summons frogs, beetles, birds, a henpecked king and a sexalicious jewel thief of a queen to our universe is poorly worked out. George does not voluntarily summon these aliens--in fact, he considers these phenomena a nuisance, they are appearing against his will--but for the plot to work we are expected to believe he can by an act of will send them back or confine them here. Seems a little contrived.

Weak filler. Like Reynolds' "Tourists to Terra," "It's Raining Frogs!" would have to wait until this century to be reprinted.

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Imagination is one of those magazines the critics look down upon, and I didn't exactly find a storehouse of ammunition today with which to challenge their dim assessment, though "Technical Slip" demonstrates Wyndham's considerable writing ability and "It's Raining Frogs!" is a useful document for those interested in the relationship of Charles Fort to SF and those looking for evidence of sexism in SF (spanking fetishists may also want to check it out!)

Speaking of stuff the critics look down upon, we've got a 1973 sword and sorcery novel coming up, so have your square-cut mane and mighty thews ready the next time you surf on over here to MPorcius Fiction Log!

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Way Out stories from the early 1950s by Milton Lesser, H. B. Fyfe, Algis Budrys & John Berryman

I already have more books and magazines than I know what to do with, but there is a limit to how many slices of pizza I can eat at Whole Foods while waiting for my wife's hair appointment to finish up. When that limit is reached, I walk a block or two to Half Price Books and sort through the spinner racks of vintage paperbacks and the shelves of 40-, 50-, and 60-year old hardcover SF books. On one such recent trip, I resisted a hardcover Orbit 10, and an anthology of stories about cavemen and dinosaurs, but on the spinner racks my eyes beheld a 2-dollar beauty I could not leave behind. This find was a paperback whose cover was totally detached from its pages, a volume stained by water and bearing, like a badge of honor, a "CLOSE-OUT .35" sticker, Way Out, an anthology edited by Ivan Howard and put out in 1963 by our friends at Belmont, the people responsible for so many remarkable productions, my love for which I have unabashedly chronicled on this here blog. I adore the weird Powers cover illo, its starker monochrome reproduction on the back cover, and the book's bold black and yellow spine. The cover text's convoluted diction elicits a chuckle rather than a sneer. Let's hope Way Out's seven stories, each "designed to appeal to the far out fiend" also merit my love! Today we'll tackle the first four stories in this charming artifact, the contributions from Milton Lesser, H. B. Fyfe, Algis Budrys and "William C. Bailey." Just for fun, besides judging whether these stories are any good, like we always do, we'll assess how "way out" they are.

"Ennui" by Milton Lesser (1952)

The cover of this 1963 paperback promises us "seven new and frightful tales," and the first page of Way Out declares: "Seven Science Fiction Stories never before published." But if you know Belmont like I know Belmont, you won't be surprised to learn all the included stories first appeared in the early 1950s. The surprise is that of the seven stories, six first appeared in Dynamic Science Fiction, and five of them all appeared in the same December 1952 issue of that magazine! "Ennui" is one of those December 1952 Dynamic stories.

(You probably remember that we read a story from Dynamic's December 1952 issue, Lester Del Rey's "I Am Tomorrow," back in 2014 when we worked our way through Belmont's Novelets of Science Fiction. It seems like that issue was the Belmont crew's very favorite SF magazine! The magazine is actually available at the internet archive should you be interested in taking a look at the original texts and the numerous illustrations.)

"Ennui" is a sort of experimental story that is supposed to blow your mind, and it uses the words "quiddity" and "solipsism" repeatedly in its nine pages, as well as mentioning David Hume. Our unnamed narrator believes that he is the center of the universe, that the rest of the universe doesn't really exist, is merely a figment of his own imagination. He finds he can make people and things vanish merely be willing them to do so. However, he cannot create anything new. Out of anger and boredom he begins willing everything out of existence, eventually making the solar system and his own body vanish, so he is a lone spirit floating in the void. Searching for diversion he travels the galaxy, then other galaxies, but each new phenomenon he discovers eventually bores him and he reacts to this boredom by destroying it. Finally, he erases the entire universe and, then, himself.

Ultimately sterile and gimmicky, perhaps, but not bad. I wrote a little about Lesser back in 2015, when I read a story by him that reminded me of Games Workshop's classic game Space Hulk.

Is it good? Marginally. Is it Way Out? Yes!

"Knowledge is Power" by H. B. Fyfe (1952)

I recognize Fyfe's name, but I don't think I've read anything by him before. isfdb lists many stories by him, appearing in many magazines, including Astounding, Amazing, and F&SF. Fyfe was born in New Jersey, so I'm already rooting for him! "Knowledge is Power" appeared in that December 1952 issue of Dynamic Science Fiction, and Fyfe's name appears on the cover.

"Knowledge is Power" stars Myru e Chib, an alien with four eyes and six limbs who lives in a sort of tyrannical medieval-type society. A former captain in the army, Myru now lives a down-and-out existence as a thief because he complained when the local ruler stole his girlfriend (she has gorgeous scales!) The despot also had two of our hero's four hands chopped off and two of his four eyes burned away! When Earthmen--an advance survey team--land on the planet, Myru makes friends with them, helping them find specimens in return for trinkets and tools. Then he tricks them into helping him overthrow the despot and make himself ruler. Myru then orders the humans executed, a move he (and Fyfe, more or less) justifies by suggesting the humans were going to exploit or enslave the natives after establishing a substantial colony.

A traditional SF story with elements we've often seen before: pre-industrial aliens, explorers from Earth, anti-imperialism, trickery. But it is entertaining; Myru is a surprisingly well-developed character, and I wasn't sure who was going to outwit who until the end--Myru is not entirely sympathetic (he murders defenseless people of his own species throughout the story) and he commits some mistakes, so it seemed possible he was going to be hoist by his own petard or simply overwhelmed by the Earthmen's modern weapons. It is often very easy to predict how an adventure story will turn out, so a genuinely unpredictable ending is welcome.

Is it good? Yes. Is it Way Out? Not really.

"Snail's Pace" by Algis Budrys (1953)

"Snail's Pace" was the cover story of the October 1953 issue of Dynamic Science Fiction. You probably remember that we've already read a story from that October issue, Frank Belknap Long's "Night Fear," when we read Belmont's Novelets.

Budrys has a high reputation (Gene Wolfe is crazy about him) and seems like an interesting guy (check out the interview of him in Charles Platt's Dream Makers), but I think he is a bit overrated, as I have said before on this here blog. Well, let's see what he is up to this time.

It is the 1960s (I think) and the United States is about to start building the first artificial satellite. And the world is about to erupt in a Third World War! The main character, General Post of the Air Force and the US space agency, uses all his influence to make sure the rocket with the parts for the space station takes off, despite the distractions of the coming war--the space station is essential to human progress! He commands and pilots the flight himself, and leads the effort to build the space station. When the war starts he even deactivates the communications equipment so none of the astronauts will be distracted by news that their homes and loved ones have been nuked!

After a few weeks the half-built station is running out of food and water, and the scheduled supply rockets from America have not been arriving. Presumably the USA is kaput. One of the astronauts mutinies, reactivating the communications equipment to contact the Earth and extort or beg supplies out of whoever won or just survived the war down there. The mutineer thinks the station, as a symbol of progress or whatever, is more important than mere politics, and if the only help forthcoming is from the people who vaporized all the astronauts' friends and family, well, so be it. Post, however, orders the evacuation of the station, saying that the radio message will just allow the enemy to target the station and blow it up. Though the effort to construct the space station was a failure, Post is confident that mankind will eventually reach the stars.

I'm giving this one a thumbs down. Budrys tries to convey to the reader the tremendous stress everybody is under by having them "shout," "bark" and "bellow" their dialogue and otherwise emote all the time. On the third page of the story we are told that "Post raked the man's face with his eyes." Three brief paragraphs later, on the very same page, Budrys writes, "Post bored into him with his eyes." Give those eyes a rest, General Post! The story thus comes off as overwrought, and there are lots of typos and weird grammatical constructions, as if the story was not edited. (Shouldn't an editor have suggested Budrys delete one of those repetitive eye metaphors?)

"Snail's Pace" features too much boring and facile philosophizing about how history works in cycles or on a twisted path or whatever, an annoying reminder of silly Marxist and Whiggish theories that argue that history has an inevitable end point. The plot is also unsatisfying, feeling like it goes nowhere--a guy works hard to get a thing built because he believes in progress, but he fails to build the thing, and then says it doesn't matter anyway because progress is inevitable. A story in which a guy builds a thing is a story of triumph, which can be moving. A story in which a guy tries and fails to build a thing is a tragedy, which can also be moving. A story in which a guy tries to build a thing, fails to build it, then decides it doesn't matter if he built it or not is a drag.

Presumably the "real" plot of the story is how the hero learned something, how he built something spiritually or psychologically and how that is more important than building a physical thing--we've all heard those quotes about how the greatest conquest is over the self or whatever. I could accept that if Budrys had made the General's intellectual or emotional journey interesting, but he didn't. This story is weak, and it is not surprising that it was never printed again after its appearance in Way Out.

Is it good? No. Is it Way Out? No.

"'X' for 'Expendable'" by "William C. Bailey" (John Berryman) (1952)

John Berryman has quite a few stories listed at isfdb, most under the William C. Bailey or Walter Bupp pseudonyms. Berryman is another son of the great state of New Jersey, so let's help he will make us Garden Staters proud--according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction he was an economist and business executive, so maybe he'll provide us a different perspective than those of the engineers, scientists, and professional genre writers we usually get our SF from.

So much for new perspectives--"'X' for 'Expendable'" is like a mash-up (the kids still say that, right?) of genre conventions. Berryman writes his story, a first-person narrative, in the style of a hard-boiled detective tale. Here's a para from the first page:

The cashier had a sharp, knifey eye, keen enough for a big-shot in the System's biggest bank. He slashed a glance at my badge and at me. "How much do you want?" he asked in a tone as cold as a frog's belly.

It is the post-nuclear war future, in which the surface of Manhattan, the center of my world and the setting of my nightly dreams, is a "drab" and "glassy" "atomic slag" and the Earth has colonized the solar system. Our hero is a detective working for the IPO, which I guess is like the future's FBI or CIA. The current iteration of New York City is an underground "warren," and the narrator spends the first half of the 47-page story in subterranean nightclubs and offices, interrogating people involved in the black market sale of cadmium. He isn't afraid to use a little muscle to get the info he needs, and when he gathers clues that direct him to the colonies on the Jovian moons he uses the IPO's authority to requisition a space navy vessel and blast off for Jupiter to look for the illegal nuclear reactor that is using that unregistered cadmium to develop nuclear weapons.

Out Jupiter way he and the local IPO guys figure out which moons to investigate, and our shamus of the future requisitions a "rocket-plane" armed with a "proton gun" to do the investigating. The second half of the story is like a James Bond movie (though "'X' for 'Expendable'" was published before the first James Bond novel was released in 1953.) The narrator is captured while investigating the criminals' base, escapes in one rocket plane and is pursued by another. The extended chase scene is where we get all the hard SF stuff--Berryman unleashes a lot of science and engineering on us during the chase, as the narrator calculates orbits and manipulates all the technical aspects of his rocket plane to keep ahead of his pursuers and send a message to IPO via unconventional means because his radio has been knocked out by enemy fire.

The writing style of the story was tiresome, and the detective stuff in the first half bored me, but I liked the violent adventure and space race business of the second half. I guess I'm giving "'X' for 'Expendable'" a grade of "Acceptable."

"'X' for 'Expendable'" appeared in that December '52 issue of Dynamic.

Is it good? Half of it is. Is it Way Out? No.

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So far, so good, I guess. In our next installment we finish up with Way Out.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

April 1956 stories by Edmond Hamilton, Milton Lesser, and "Alexander Blade"

At an antiques store in Illinois called Winter Wheat I recently purchased, for like $2.20, a bedraggled copy of the April 1956 issue of Imagination. According to Wikipedia all the critics think Imagination was a piece of crap, but flipping through the issue in Illinois, with South Carolina ("Look honey, I caught you this toad in the parking lot!") behind me and a stop at Steak & Shake ("Didn't I tell the waitress 'no mayo?'") ahead of me, the magazine looked like a lot of fun. There's an Edmond Hamilton story and a charming little autobiographical essay by Hamilton, fun illustrations and comics that my college education requires me to warn you are sexist, a column that reviews fanzines, and a letters section in which fans of Imagination call the periodical "Madge," which I thought was just adorable.

This week I read three stories from the magazine; let's see if the critics are right to dismiss old Madge. These three stories are available for free online at gutenberg.org, so even you cheapos out there don't have to let the critics (or me) do your thinking for you.

True riches come not from gold or diamonds, but from fulfilling relationships.

"The Legion of Lazarus" by Edmond Hamilton

This is one of those noirish stories in which a working class tough guy (in this case an electrician) uses his wits and his fists in a struggle against a ruthless interplanetary tycoon who has framed him for murder. It also reminded me of a van Vogt story, in that an ordinary man develops psychic powers and super-intelligence and gets involved in a twilight struggle between merciless factions of weirdos.

Hyrst was working as part of a four-man team on Titan, doing maintenance on a robot mining operation. The team's engineer, MacDonald, keeps bragging that he has found a vein of titanite, but won't tell anybody where he found it. When MacDonald gets killed, Hyrst stands trial for murder on one of the moons of Mars, and, convicted, gets executed by being tossed out the airlock!

Fifty years later, Hyrst is revived! He hears voices in his head; he is now a member of the Legion of Lazarus, a group of people with various ESP abilities! After a scene in which Hyrst's son, who is now physically older than his father, denounces his father for ruining the family name, Hyrst follows the directions of the voices in his head and gets his ass to Mars. On Mars he joins up with a group of Lazarites who are led by Christina, a beautiful but bitterly angry woman ("she was like a fire, burning with anger, burning with a single-minded, dedicated purpose. She was beautiful, and frightening.") Christina's group is at war with Bellaver, a businessman trying to win a monopoly on spacecraft construction; they have half-built the first interstellar ship, and Bellaver wants it. To finish the ship, Christina's people need to find that titanite of MacDonald's.

Over the course of the story (billed as a novel, and taking up like 50 pages of the magazine) people get captured and escape, there are space ship chases through the Asteroid Belt and a foot chase and siege on the surface of an asteroid, Hyrst beats people with a fire extinguisher, Bellaver uses an artificial gravity device to torture somebody, and other fun stuff. The secret of who killed MacDonald (an employee of Bellaver's, of course) and the location of the titanite are extracted from Hyrst's brain. We also get a vague explanation of how all these people got their psychic powers and how they came back to life after being tossed into a vacuum.

I thought this was a quite good space opera. In particular, I liked how Hamilton described Hyrst's mental powers and how he grew into them, and the good job he did with all the settings: the snowy landscape of Titan; the surface of an asteroid littered with the eroded monuments of a prehistoric civilization; the cities of Mars, where the hooded natives, now a minority on their own planet, live in monolithic stone houses among the humans' modern buildings; Bellaver's orbital pleasure palace, etc. Hamilton also focuses on Hyrst's psychology, his shame, fear, anger. The story also gives us hints of those staples of classic SF, the paradigm shift (when the public finds out about the Lazarites) and the "sense of wonder" ending, when the Lazarites in their hyperspace ship flash off to explore the universe. "The Legion of Lazarus" also appeals to the apparently insatiable appetite of readers for tales of the evils of the bourgeoisie. I find it hard to believe that the critics had this great adventure story in mind when they were badmouthing poor Madge!

"The Graveyard of Space" by Milton Lesser

On August 7, via twitter, Joachim Boaz reminded us it was Milton Lesser's birthday. Jumping at a chance for a little self-promotion, I took this opportunity to remind the world that I had reviewed Lesser's novel Secret of the Black Planet at Amazon, pronouncing it bland and forgettable. According to Wikipedia, Lesser, under the pen name Stephen Marlowe, won awards for his detective and mainstream fiction, so maybe he just put together Secret of the Black Planet on a bad day (or maybe back in January of 2012 I was just being a hardass) and I am going to love "The Graveyard of Space"! Let's hope so!

Ralph and Diane Meeker (!) are headed home from Asteroid 4712, their efforts to mine it for uranium having come to nothing. Their failure is straining their marriage. Then their second-hand space ship's radar fails, and they get sucked into the gravitational pull of a sargasso of dead spaceships, thousands of defunct craft orbiting in a swarm together. (Remember Space Hulk? Damn, my brother and I spent a pile of money on that stuff.) The asteroid prospectors put on their space suits and split up to search the lost ships for a working radar set which will fit their model of ship.

This is an attempt at a horror story, and Lesser spends a lot of time describing the dead bodies on the wrecked ships. Then Diane gets attacked by an insane man who has been stuck in the graveyard of ships for years and survived by cannibalism. Ralph defeats the maniac in hand to hand combat. Luckily, this very same ship has the radar set they need. Ralph and Diane escape the Asteroid Belt; their ordeal has made them realize how much they truly love each other, and saved their marriage.

This story (fewer than 12 pages of text) feels like filler, but it is not bad. An acceptable entertainment.

"Zero Hour" by "Alexander Blade"

Who is Alexander Blade, you ask? I asked isfdb and Wikipedia the same thing, and found that it was a pen name used by many authors I have heard of, like Edmond Hamilton, Robert Silverberg, and John Jakes, as well as by authors I was unfamiliar with. A few minutes googling did not provide any definitive info on exactly whose pen was responsible for "Zero Hour;" if you know better, please don't keep it to yourself! Hamilton is a prime suspect; in the very next issue of Imagination his story "Battle for the Stars" appeared under the Alexander Blade pseudonym. (I read the full length book version of Battle for the Stars and reviewed it at Amazon in January of 2012.)

I can see why nobody jumped up to take credit for this story; it's a trifle that reads like it was aimed at children, a strange contrast after Lesser's macabre story about failure, death, cannibalism and marriage. Little Bobby's family lives on a high security government research base. Bobby learns that his father is working on a rocket headed for the moon, and even learns the secret launching date. On launch day Bobby sneaks aboard the rocket, assuming his dad is flying to the moon, but then gets cold feet, and sneaks back home to Mom before lift off. It is lucky he did, because this was an experimental rocket which was sent, unmanned, to the moon to explode and mark the lunar surface with dye.

A competent but bland, innocuous sort of story.

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If most of Imagination's contents were like "Graveyard of Space" and "Zero Hour" I suppose the critics have a point, but I thought Hamilton's "The Legion of Lazarus" was an above average space opera, and I certainly have no regrets spending a little time with Madge. Maybe I'll take my copy of this April '56 issue out of its plastic bag and take a look at the other three included stories in the future.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Last of the Novelets: Blish and Clarke

At this here blog we've been reading Novelets of Science Fiction, a paperback anthology of early 1950s stories published first in 1963 (I have the 1967 printing.) In a spirit of friendly competition we will be crowning the writer of the best novelet, and so far Poul Anderson is in the lead. But we have high hopes for today's contenders, James Blish, my fellow Jersey boy and Rutgers alum, and Arthur C. Clarke, writer, explorer, and TV and film icon.

"Testament of Andros" by James Blish (1953)

If you've been following my investigation of Novelets of Science Fiction you won't be surprised to learn, despite claims on the front and back cover of the book, that "Testament of Andros" appeared in a paperback collection of Blish stories in 1961 entitled So Close to Home.

"Testament of Andros" is the craziest and most experimental of the stories in Novelets of Science Fiction. It consists of five first-person narratives, each told by a male with a name that is a variant of "Andrew," and each in part about the narrator's relationship with a female whose name is a variant of "Margaret." These narratives all take place on an alternate Earth (among other things, it has 12 continents and its version of Wagner wrote an opera titled Tristan and Messalina) which is devastated by a solar flare that kills the majority of life on the planet.

Each of the stories details human unhappiness, and most of them feature some kind of injustice or depravity. A scientist believes a grad student is taking credit for his research and having an affair with his wife, so he murders the student. A working class orphan grows up to be a rapist and murderer and dies in prison when the solar flare hits. An eight-year-old child who fantasizes about being a space hero tries to come to terms with his unhappy family and school life as well as the solar flare. Some of the narratives take a dim view of religion, suggesting that organized religion has failed to comfort and guide people, while one of them is written by an insane person who claims to have seen God and has started his own religion.

This is a good "literary" story that reminded me of the kind of experimental work we associate with the New Wave of ten or more years later. It tackles religion, psychology, gender relations, the family, economics, all that heavy stuff.

"The Possessed" by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

This six page story in which Clarke ponders why lemmings sometimes jump to their deaths en masse is gimmicky and forgettable. It was included in a 1956 paperback, Reach for Tomorrow.

A non-corporeal life form, parasitic in nature, is floating through space, looking for an intelligent species to serve as its host. After millions of fruitless years of searching it lands on Earth during the Age of Reptiles. With no intelligent hosts available, the creature opts for a desperate expedient: it will split in two parts, one portion remaining on Earth, the other half continuing the search. Should the space-going half find an attractive host species somewhere else in the universe, it will return with the good news. The two halves agree on a meeting place, which the Earthbound portion of the creature will return to periodically.

The Earthbound portion of the alien colonizes the minds of small mammals in hopes they will evolve intelligence. Instead, they evolve into lemmings. Millions of years in non-intelligent hosts takes a toll, and the parasite creature grows weaker and weaker until it is essentially dead. The lemmings, however, retain an instinctive need to periodically return to the meeting place, an instinct which overrides any thought of safety, and the fact that the meeting place is now underwater.

This story is inoffensive, so I would grade it "OK" or "acceptable," but it has zero feeling and no characters or plot--it is just an odd speculation.

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It's time to rate the eight "superlative" stories found in Novelets of Science Fiction and crown a King of the Novelets!

James Blish put in a good showing, but I have to judge him our rummer up--which means Poul Anderson, with his story, "The Chapter Ends," is King of the Novelets! "The Chapter Ends" has multiple interesting SF ideas, emotional content, characters who make big decisions, and memorable images, and actually made me consider what I would do and how I would feel in the situations he describes. So, congrats to Poul.

Simak and Clarke's stories are sort of one note idea tales, lacking in plot or feeling, and so they bring up the rear. Frank Belknap Long's "Night Fear" is also vulnerable to the charge that it is just an idea and not really a story, but I found the idea interesting and I think Long's piece had some added human drama.

Our three violent adventure stories, by Del Rey, Lesser and de Camp, make up the middle of the pack. Each has its own charm; Del Rey has his ponderings about politics and free will, Lesser his hard-boiled stylings, and De Camp has his mediocre jokes.

Here are our rankings:

Winner                        Poul Anderson      "The Chapter Ends"
Runner Up                  James Blish       "The Testament of Andros"
3rd place Frank Belknap Long     "Night Fear"
4th place                     Lester Del Rey              "I Am Tomorrow"
5th place                     Milton Lesser      "'A' as in Android"
6th place                     L. Sprague de Camp     "Ultrasonic God"
7th place                     Clifford Simak              "...And the Truth Shall Make You Free"
8th place Arthur C. Clarke     "The Possessed"

Novelets of Science Fiction is a good collection; none of the stories were bad. A worthwhile purchase for those, like me, interested in 1950s SF!

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Three 1950s Novelets: De Camp, Anderson, & Lesser

Those who follow my twitter account will already know of the new love in my life, the cover painting of the 1967 printing of Novelets of Science Fiction, edited by Ivan Howard. Who gifted our undeserving world with this Platonic ideal of all our dreams of green winged women, heavily armed astronauts, colossal eggs which give birth to stars (?), and teeming flocks of Pteranodons? Nobody seems to know! Our benefactor chooses to remain anonymous!

This collection of early 1950s stories was first published in 1963. (The fact that the stories were over a dozen years old when my edition was printed didn't stop the publisher, Belmont, from trumpeting this volume as "THE BOOK OF THE YEAR." This is a self-confidence I can admire!)

I could go on all day about the cover of Novelets of Science Fiction, but as the careers of Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor have shown us, it's not looks, but what's on the inside that counts! So let's take a gander at three "superlative" 1950s SF tales by "modern masters of science fiction," L. Sprague de Camp, Poul Anderson, and Milton Lesser.

"Ultrasonic God" by L. Sprague de Camp (1951)

When I was living back East I read a bunch of L. Sprague de Camp stories, mostly the Viagens Interplanetarias tales about guys going on sword-swinging adventures on an alien planet. These stories were the product of De Camp setting himself the difficult task of writing John Carter style "planetary romance" or "sword and planet" stories that were more realistic than the Burroughs archetype. The books (most of them have a capital "Z" in the title) were not bad, but were also not memorable.

"Ultrasonic God" is set in the Viagens universe, and is a pretty straightforward adventure story. I suspect years ago I read a different version of it with a different title.

Adrian Frome is a blonde Englishman (he says stuff like "Cheerio!" and "Righto!" and "Delighted to meet you, old thing!") and an engineer working as a surveyor for the Earth-based government on an alien planet. He gets captured by primitive natives, and is taken to another Earthman, a Thai, whom the alien tribesmen see as a god. This ambitious human is trying to make himself emperor of all the disparate local tribes, and to that end is training this tribe in modern military discipline and making them simple firearms. He forces Frome to work in his little gunsmithy. He has also captured an Earthwoman, a pretty missionary, and expects to found his dynasty with her.

In the grand tradition of pro-science and pro-engineering SF, our hero saves the day by doing some engineering. The would be emperor issues commands to the natives, who have dog-like hearing, by blowing notes on a Galton whistle (what I would call a dog whistle.) Frome attaches a dog whistle to a kettle and puts the full kettle on the fire; when the water boils it blows the whistle so loud that it distracts the natives, and they cannot hear the Thai's signals. Frome rescues the missionary from being raped by the aspiring emperor, kills the Thai in hand to hand combat with medieval weapons, and then he and the missionary escape the natives. Frome falls in love with the missionary, proposes marriage, but then runs out on her to a different planet when he realizes she takes her kooky religion, which she talks about unceasingly, seriously and their marriage will be a celibate one.

This is an inoffensive but unimpressive story. Maybe the numerous sly references to sex are daring by 1951 standards? I guess one could also see the story as a kind of spoof of John Carter's career (remember, Carter became Emperor of Mars; in this story a man with such imperial ambitions is the villain, not the hero. In "Ultrasonic God" our hero is a humble civil servant...who turns out to be an expert at fighting with machine guns, spears and swords. So maybe not that different from John Carter after all.) Feminists might want to study the story because most of the jokes are at the expense of women. (Example: Frome says that Englishmen don't let their women walk all over them like the Americans do.)

I grade this one "acceptable;" presumably I will soon forget all about it.

"The Chapter Ends" by Poul Anderson (1954)

The beautiful front and back covers of Novelets of Science Fiction both proudly claim that the eight stories it contains have not appeared in paperback before. Yet, according to isfdb, "The Chapter Ends" appeared in an Ace Double, Adventures in the Far Future / Tales of Outer Space, the same year it appeared in an American magazine and a British magazine. Never trust a pretty face!

It is many thousands of years in the future. Mankind has spread throughout the galaxy, and the human race has been genetically engineered into a multitude of different races, each suited to a particular environment. People now normally live to be over a thousand years old, and many people can simply fly through space without a space ship by tapping into "cosmic energy" with their GMO brains!

There is another powerful race of people in the galaxy, the Hulduvians, who can also tap into the cosmic energies with their brains. Unfortunately, human and Hulduvian brains are different, so they cannot use their brain powers in each others' vicinity. So the two space empires sign a treaty and divide up the galaxy; the humans get the galactic center, and the Hulduvians get the rim. All humans must evacuate the rim systems.

One such system is that of Sol and the Earth. Fifty thousand years ago Earth was the capitol of the human space empire, but nowadays Earth is a backwater and has almost no contact with Galactic civilization. The few people who currently reside on Earth and are of primitive stock that only live 200 years and have no mental powers. These people are living the environmentalist dream, using only 19th century technology, growing food with their hands, eating only what their own communities produce, engaging in no international trade. Members of the Galactic civilization have to come to tell them they have to leave, and then spend years building space ships to take them away because their puny all-natural and organic brains can't carry them off the planet.

This is a mood piece with more sentiment than plot. We see the different ways various people from the Galactic civilization respond to seeing the Earth, home of their ancestors, and how various Earthlings react to being forced to leave their homes. Perhaps most entertaining are Anderson's descriptions of the vast ruins of Sol City, once capitol of the human part of the galaxy. Also worth remarking upon is Anderson's vision of the lifestyle of the Galactics-- in contrast to the tightly-knit Earth villages, which almost seem like European peasant villages of a pre-industrial period, the Galactics have abandoned community entirely, living like hermits, with no marriages, no families, and, as one disgruntled Earthling says, "No tradition...I pity you Galactics!"

This is a good story that makes you think about tradition, community, and how people respond to change. The more I think about it, the more I like it.

"'A' as in Android" by Milton Lesser (1951)

Back in January of 2012 I read Milton Lesser's fix-up novel Secret of the Black Planet and wrote a mildly negative review of it on Amazon. I think that is my only previous exposure to Lesser. Here I am giving him a second chance--don't believe all those people who say I'm not open-minded!

"'A' as in Android" first appeared in a magazine, and in 2013 served as title story of a collection of Lesser tales published by Armchair Fiction as one of their Masters of Science Fiction series.

"'A' as in Android" is written like one of those hard-boiled detective stories, a first person narrative from a tough guy on an investigation. Our narrator, Carmody, works for the government's Android Service, and he just got to Hyperion, one of Saturn's moons. A club owner on Hyperion has a squad of dancing girls so beautiful, so graceful, that they can't be human; they must be androids. The club owner hasn't paid the android tax, and Carmody has come to Hyperion to collect.

As it turns out, the girls are not androids, but infiltrators from another dimension in disguise. There's a fist fight, and Carmody is overpowered (the extradimensional girls are super strong and don't even need to wear a space suit when exposed to hard vacuum, as the story's illustration shows) and the girls put him in one of their machines. This machine transfers his mind from his body to an android body; his original body is then tossed in an alley! After some more hand to hand combat Carmody escapes and tries to warn the authorities, but since he's in an android body, no one believes him. Poor Carmody, trapped in an android body, has to watch as more and more clubs, throughout the Solar System, employ impossibly graceful dancing girls, alone in the knowledge that this is a sign of mankind's impending slavery to aliens from another dimension!

I don't think this story holds together if you look at it too closely, so I'm not going to look at it too closely. Instead I'll just judge it "acceptable" as a piece of fast-paced and brief entertainment and move on with my life. The whole thing is crazy enough that I am willing to read more Lesser stories to see how crazy they are.

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"THE BOOK OF THE YEAR" is probably a stretch, but so far I'm liking Novelets of Science Fiction. I will read all the stories and crown a winner; so far Poul Anderson is in the lead.

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