When last we met, we noted that Terry Carr (remember when we read his novel Cirque?) included Lester del Rey's odd story "The Smallest God" in his 1978 anthology Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age.  Let's check out some other stories Carr reprinted in that book, after of course pointing out that we have already blogged about some of his selections: A. E. van Vogt's "The Vault of the Beast,"  Eric Frank Russell and Maurice G. Hugi's "The Mechanical Mice," and Robert A. Heinlein's "--And He Built a Crooked House--."  (And that, before this blog was conjured up from the black labyrinth of my mind and began to lurk the intertubes, I read still more of them, like Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps.")

"Into Darkness" by Ross Rocklynne (1940)

I have a poor memory, and so I wasn't sure if I had read "Into Darkness" before or not, so I dug through the archives to make certain and uncovered sobering evidence of how bad my memory really is--in 2018 I read and blogged about Rocklynne's story "Quietus," and then in 2023 I read and blogged about "Quietus" again, having totally forgotten I'd read it five years earlier.  Embarrassing!  (Is Nancy Pelosi going to engineer a campaign to have me deposed as head of this blog?)

Well, I'm pretty confident I haven't read Rocklynne's "Into Darkness" before (no, really), even though I own it in the collection Sun Destroyers (which is the other half of the Ace Double that reprinted Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla), so let's have at it.  "Into Darkness" first saw print in Astonishing, edited by Fred Pohl.  I am reading the story, like all of today's stories, in the internet archive's scan of Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age, though of course I took a quick look at the magazine to see the (below average for him) Hannes Bok illo for "Into Darkness."

In his intro to the story, Carr suggests "Into Darkness" is "far out," and it definitely is an effort to blow your mind and inspire the famous "sense of wonder."  The universe is inhabited by creatures of pure energy, creatures millions of miles across, creatures that live for billions of years, creatures that absorb energy from stars, move planets about for fun, and can shift between any of the forty-seven different levels of hyperspace, each of which obeys different laws of physics.  Rocklynne's story is a sort of biography of one such creature, and we witness its early millennia, its adolescence and its growth to maturity.  Named "Darkness" by its mother, Sparkle, our main character is different than its fellows--smarter, more inquisitive, abandoning childish play earlier than others in its cohort and seeking to fulfill some purpose in its life.  (Presumably the kinds of smart kids who are thought to be the audience for science fiction, kids who love science and want to learn about the world around them and to accomplish something with their lives, are expected to identify with Darkness.)  Darkness yearns to resolve the riddle of what constitutes the meaning of life, to learn what is beyond the edge of the universe, and is not discouraged when one of the oldest of the energy beings, known as Oldster, warns such investigations lead to sadness and death! 

Darkness was named by Sparkle after the darkness at the edge of the universe, and insists on living up to its name and exploring that mysterious void.  Darkness devours a star bigger than any star it has ever seen, and with that energy breaches the edge of the universe and travels through the emptiness for millions of years.  Finally, Darkness comes to another universe much like the one it left.  There it meets another energy creature, but whereas Darkness has a purple core, this being has a green core.  Darkness falls in love, and proposes passing a life of exploration with its new acquaintance, but this creature would rather lead Darkness to a forty-eighth level of hyperspace Darkness has never heard about before and there take possession of our hero's purple core.  Darkness learns that the purpose of life is to create more life, which green-core energy creatures do by accepting into themselves purple cores...of course, without their cores, purple-core energy creatures wither and die.  (Woah, is this a story about how women will steal your life force and you should avoid having sex with them?)  Before it expires, Darkness creates a planet and seeds it with life-giving protoplasm, which I guess we are supposed to think is Earth.

I sort of expected Darkness to create the human race, but the revelation that these energy creatures reproduce sexually and that the male can only do the deed once--and that it is fatal!--was a surprise.  I'm not sure it is a good surprise, though, as the fact that they reproduce through sex makes the aliens in this story less alien and thus less mind-blowing.

"Into Darkness" is just alright; besides the somewhat disappointing ending, it feels a little long and repetitive, as we hear again and again that Darkness lives for millions of years and is millions of miles across and travels millions of miles and so on--stuff that is supposed to fill you with wonder ceases to be mind blowing with familiarity.  More conventional sense-of-wonder stories start out more or less mundane and then grow steadily more strange until the final page tries to blow you away with the idea that the universe is open to exploration and contains infinite adventure; "Into Darkness" starts out strange and by depicting life on an epic scale and actually becomes more mundane at the end (just like so many ordinary guys. the alien creature loses his heart to a girl.) 

"Into Darkness" has been reprinted in a few anthologies besides Carr's here, and was followed by three sequels, all of which can be found in that Ace Double collection I mentioned, The Sun Destroyers.

"Child of the Green Light" by Leigh Brackett (1942)

We've read a lot of science fiction and crime fiction by Leigh Brackett, wife of Edmond Hamilton and crony of Bogie and The Duke, but I don't think we've read this one before.  "Child of the Green Light" made its debut in Super Science Stories (this issue also has illustrations by Bok, images more characteristic of his work that are worth checking out) and was reprinted in a 1951 ish of Super Science and in a book I have owned since 2013, Martian Quest.  (Why do you buy these books if you don't read them?, asks my financial advisor.)   

"Child of the Green Light" is a somewhat confusing story as it depicts a crazy scenario that Brackett sketches out in a pithy style and doesn't really explain until the end, leaving me struggling at times to visualize what is going on.  Of course, the real meat of the story isn't its questionable science but themes of loyalty and sacrifice and one's relationship to his people--do you owe something to people you haven't met just because you share their blood or culture?  

A young man, naked, is living in or on a conglomeration of wrecked space ships (in Warhammer 40,000 we'd call this a "space hulk"), somehow surviving in the vacuum of space!  The space hulk is in the form of a disk or wheel, with a green light at its center.  The young man, who goes by the name of Son, is in communication telepathically with a being he calls Aona, who lives on the other side of a "Veil" with a capital "V," which is growing thinner all the time; I guess the Veil and the light are one and the same or closely related.  Aona is a female being whom he loves; though she calls him "Son" and could be said to have raised him, I guess their relationship has an erotic character or erotic potential, and they look forward to the time the Veil falls and they can be together.

Another ship appears and lands on the hulk, and from it emerges a multicultural expedition of men in space suits; some of them are Earth humans, other hail from Mars or one of the moons of Saturn. Through their dialogue we learn that that green light passed through the Solar System, attracting to it and carrying off space ships as it went and finally settling here near Mercury.  The green light is bathing the System in radiation that is radically accelerating the aging process in humans--soon civilization will collapse because nobody lives long enough to learn the science and engineering required to maintain a modern high-tech society.  This team, among whom is the last living physicist, constitutes humanity's last hope of destroying the green light before it is too late.

Son and Aona want to preserve the light, so Son stops the physicist from approaching it, killing the man in the process.  The ray guns of the humans have no effect on Son, but they are able to tie him up, however.  Through more dialogue we learn that Son is the only survivor among the passengers and crew of all the many ships brought here by the green light; he has an adult body now, but he was just a baby when his parents' ship was captured and his parents were killed five years ago.

Aona then explains more of what is going on.  She is native to another universe, where people are immortal.  Her universe suffered a cosmic cataclysm, and the resultant explosion destroyed most of her universe and threw a tiny surviving sliver of it (a sliver still big enough to include multiple planets) through the dark barrier between universes so it intersected with our universe.  Son has become a superman because his atoms are changing, starting to vibrate at the frequency of Aona's universe--currently, a fraction of his atoms are still in our dimension, while most are vibrating at the frequency of Aona's dimension.  Eventually he will join Aona's universe, I guess when all his atoms are vibrating on Aona's frequency, or maybe because the Veil has finally eroded.  This story is a bit confusing, as I said; sometimes I think we are meant to visualize universes are physically distinct with dark empty space--the "Between" with a capital "B"--separating them, like they are raisins in a cake, but other times it is suggested the different universe are parallel, inhabiting the same space but at different vibrations.

To save human civilization, the green light must be destroyed, which will separate the two universes.  The only way to destroy the green light is for Son to enter the light before he has fully transformed; the presence of alien atoms will cause the green light to expire and the universes to be separated; Son will, however, fall into the Between, forever barred from entering either our or Aona's universes.  Son, only now realizing that other living things beside he and Aona exist, and that he is the product (the "son") of a race and civilization distinct from Aona's, has to decide if he is going to destroy himself to save his people (about whom he knows almost nothing), or allow his people to expire so he can live in eternal bliss with Aona.

There is also a subplot about how a member of the expedition tries to murder all his comrades, become a superman, destroy the green light, and then become dictator of the Solar System.

"Child of the Green Light" features many themes we've seen before in Brackett's work and that of her husband--many Hamilton stories are about a planet or star whose people suffered a cosmic catastrophe and so they are moving their heavenly body into some other system, and many Hamilton stories depict radiation changing people, and I think that Brackett's novel The Big Jump, which I read before founding this blog, involved a guy stabbing people on his expedition in the back so he could bathe himself in radiation and become a superman.

This story is not bad, but I found it a little challenging to follow--Brackett provides a minimum of information, so I had to really pay attention to get what was going on, and I still am not sure it all makes sense.

"The Twonky" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (1942/1975)

I've read stacks of stuff by married couple Kuttner and Moore, things they produced individually as well as collaborations, but I haven't read this one; I kind of think I have been avoiding it because its title makes it sound like a joke story, and Kuttner's (many) humor pieces generally fall flat with me (sample MPorcius pans of Kuttner humor pieces: "Or Else," "The Ego Machine," and "See You Later.")  But let's give "The Twonky" a shot today.  

Bopping hither and tither at isfdb and the internet archive, one will often discover little gems.  My latest uncovered treasure is the June 1953 issue of Robert W. Lowndes' Dynamic Science Fiction.  The issue has a terrific red cover, a montage of classic SF elements like a man in a spacesuit, a satellite, a rocket ship ready for launch, an atomic bomb blowing up your town...and a naked woman in chains!  Wow!   

Inside, we find the magazine is full of beautiful little sex and violence spot illustrations and chapter headings that probably have nothing to do with the stories in which they appear.  There's a naked woman expressing dismay with heavy machinery, a naked woman reclining high in the atmosphere, multiple crashed rockets (stop texting while driving, guys!), a man in a space helmet brandishing his ray pistol, a woman using her pistol to disintegrate a man (you've come a long way, baby!), a variety of futuristic artillery and armored vehicles, and on and on.

Alright, now the stories, tales by Raymond Z. Gallun, Raymond E. Banks, and C. M. Kornbluth and Donald A. Wollheim writing under the pen name "Wallace Baird Halleck."

In our last episode, we read mid-1930s stories from Amazing full of robotics, ray guns and aliens both malignant and beneficent.  Let's stick with the mid-Thirties, but shift gears to the weird!  Today's subject: the June 1934 issue of Weird Tales, which includes numerous stories by important figures in the history of speculative fiction. Let's check out four, stories by Jack Williamson, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and August Derleth in collaboration with Mark Schorer.

"Wizard's Isle" by Jack Williamson 

I haven't read much Williamson since this blog wriggled out from under the overturned rock of my mind, but in the years prior I read many Williamson novels, among them The Legion of Space, The Cometeers, One Against the Legion, Seetee Ship, The Reefs of Space (with Frederik Pohl), The Power of Blackness, Star Bridge (with James E. Gunn), The Black Sun, and Life Burst.  All those were science fiction stories featuring space travel, and I tend to think of Williamson as a pioneer of space opera and hard science fiction concepts like terraforming and antimatter, but The Black Sun has Lovecraftian elements and The Legion of Space has some serious horror elements and Williamson also wrote a famous novel about witches and werewolves--Darker Than You Think--which I have not read, so it seems he was far from averse to handling fantasy and horror themes.  Let's check out "Wizard's Isle," a Weird Tales cover story, and see to what extent it sticks to the hard sciences and how much it explores supernatural material.  

Jason Wade is a Yale man!  He has spent two years in China, "working a tin concession," or, as a college professor might put it, exploiting the labor of the developing world and stealing natural resources from the global south.  While there, he got word that his fiancé back in New York, Tonia Hope, had disappeared!  He hired a Big Apple private dick by wire and got to Gotham as fast as he could--"as fast as he could" adds up to two months!  As the story begins Jason is in the P. I.'s office, learning that Tonia was probably seized by some mysterious weirdo called "Mr. Alexander," an Asian ("Oriental" is what they say in this 1934 story) also known as "Iskandar the Wizard of Life."  Iskandar has been buying millions of dollars worth of scientific equipment and is rumored to have spent millions more on some mysterious construction in the Arabian Sea which has since vanished.  Iskandar is also suspected in the kidnapping of biologist Jerry Travers, a fellow Yalie!

Jason begins his own investigation, and is almost immediately kidnapped and taken by plane to a huge ship, an artificial floating island somewhere on the ocean, to be dragged before Iskandar himself, a man half-Oriental, half-Occidental, with almond eyes, ivory skin, and feminine red lips.  The man is a genius and a sadist who used drugs and radiation to transform Jerry Travers's body into that of a giant scorpion, while keeping the man's human head and brain intact so Jerry knows the horror that has befallen him!  Jerry's wife was forced to watch this weeks-long transformation, which drove her insane before she died of misery.

You might say that Williamson is trying to exploit our fear of and disgust at things which live on both sides of boundaries, things that violate borders and do not stay within the sharply defined categories with which we are comfortable.  Is Iskandar white or Asian?  Is he male or female?  Is Jerry Travers a human or an arachnid?  The fact that Iskandar is both Western and Eastern, and a man with some feminine characteristics, and that Travers is part human and part scorpion, is meant to disturb us, to excite our horror and disgust.

Iskandar shares his plans with Jason, as evil geniuses in fiction are wont to do.  Like his namesake and ancestor Alexander of Macedon, Iskandar is going to remake the world!  The Wizard of Life is going to create a new race of supermen who will conquer and enslave homo sapiens, and beautiful blond and blue-eyed Tonia Hope, after her body is suitably altered via drugs and radiation, will be the mother of this new super race!  

Among his army of Asians, Iskandar has two Caucasian-American thugs who represent his interests in the USA--it is these jokers who captured Jason in NYC.  Iskandar orders them to throw Jason into the ocean, and as they drag him to the edge of the artificial island Jason implores them to think of themselves as white men, to help him avenge their fellow whites Mr. and Mrs. Travers and protect white woman Tonia Hope from a fate worse than death.  They scoff, saying Iskandar pays them a thousand bucks a week!  These race traitors throw Jason into the ocean, but luckily he is a strong swimmer and finds his way to a drainage outlet and crawls back into the floating island.

Right into a giant terrarium thing, a dense jungle under a huge dome.  The jungle is bathed in radiation that causes the jungle life to mutate in mind-boggling ways!  Jason is confronted by such sights as maggots two or three feet long boring into gigantic mushrooms covered in monstrous vines, and even worse nightmare visions.  Iskandar with two Chinese riflemen comes down into this mad house of evolution run wild to destroy a giant centipede which is out of control and Jason ambushes them, but after a tough fight Jason ends up captured again.

Jason is to be turned into a half-man, half-scorpion like Jerry Travers was, but when he is dragged to the radiation cell in which Travers is held the biologist recognizes Jason and attacks the Chinese soldiers.  Jerry and Jason run through the corridors of the ship's superstructure, killing Chinese soldiers, the American thugs, and finally Iskandar.  Jerry the scorpion man succumbs to the grisly gunshot wounds he suffered during the fighting, but Jason and Tonia, after shooting it out with some more Chinese, escape in the plane in which he was brought.  (Jason can fly planes as well as swim and shoot like a champ--these Yale men are well-rounded!)  Right before he died, Iskandar rotated the control that scuttled his floating island, so his experiments and the remnants of his army are lost forever beneath the waves.

An entertaining Yellow peril/mad scientist story with lots of horror and gore content that also reflects Williamson's hard science interests (Williamson was, according to wikipedia, one of the first people to write about genetic engineering and apparently coined that term.)  This is a competent weird story much akin to something our pal Edmond Hamilton might write--Hamilton and Williamson lack the sort of distinctive literary style that top shelf weirdies like H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard bring to their work, but the boys from Ohio and Arizona have an interest in the sciences that distinguishes their productions from those worthies. 

"Wizard's Isle" was reprinted in England in 1945 under the title "Lady in Danger" in a sort of pamphlet with a photo of a nude woman on its cover.  It is also the title story of the third volume in Haffner Press's eight-volume series The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson. 

"The Haunter of the Ring" by Robert E. Howard

Speak of the devil, on the next page of Weird Tales's June '34 issue we see the title of Robert Howard's contribution to the issue and a somewhat crude drawing of a topless woman.  "The Haunter of the Ring" has of course been reprinted many times, including in the 1968 issue of Robert A. Lowndes's magazine Startling Mystery Stories (which reproduces not only the text of the tale but the drawing of the topless woman.)  

James Gordon is the great-grandson of Sir Richard Gordon of Argyle.  Sir Richard is famous for being a cruel jerk and for murdering his wife in a jealous fit.  Well, as the story opens, Jim Gordon tells his buddies, our narrator Michael O'Donnell and some Irish adventurer type named Kirowan, that he thinks he is the reincarnation of his nefarious ancestor, and his wife Evelyn is Sir Richard's reincarnated wife, Lady Elizabeth, because over the last few days Evelyn has tried to murder him three times!

Our narrator quickly links this bizarre turn of events to Joseph Roelocke, a rich guy who reads lots of books and looks like a foreigner, maybe an "Oriental."  Roelocke dated Evelyn before she married Gordon, and recently sent Evelyn a ring in the shape of a snake biting its tail as a sort of belated wedding gift.  O'Donnell and Kirowan join the Gordons at home to have a look at this ring, which Evelyn says is stuck so tight to her finger she can't get it off.  Then two more characters appear (for a story of this length there are a lot of characters), Doctor Donnelly and Bill Bain, old friends of Evelyn's family.

During their confab Evelyn gets hold of a pistol and shoots her husband, proving the truth of Gordon's incredible story of being targeted for death by his wife, but not all that reincarnation bunk.  While Donnelly and Bain tend to Gordon's wound, Kirowan and O'Donnell jump in the car and drive over to Roelocke's.  It turns out Kirowan and Roelocke, whose real name is Yosef Vrolok, studied the occult together in Hungary, but their friendship ended when Vrolok embraced the dark side!  Vrolok used his black magic to steal Kirowan's girlfriend, whom he then "debauched;" Kirowan tried to kill Vrolok, but the guy's sorcery preserved him.

Now the two foes meet again, and Kirowan exposes the truth of the curse suffered by Evelyn.  Vrolok has summoned a demon to possess Evelyn so she will murder her husband; in return Vrolok promised the demon a soul, intending the soul to be Evelyn or James Gordon's.  Kirowan works a psychological trick on Vrolok, making the wizard doubt his ability to control the demon, and this moment of weakness gives the demon a chance to kill Vrolok and carry off his soul with it to a place "outside the human universe."

(Don't worry, Gordon only suffered a graze and he and Evelyn live happily ever after.)

This story is OK.  I have to admit that it was a little disappointing that all that reincarnation business turned out to be a red herring.  Another noteworthy and perhaps disappointing thing about "The Haunter of the Ring" is how everybody in it is so passionate--all the characters are constantly yelling or weeping or threatening to beat each other up; maybe this is Howard depicting the idea that Celtic people--Irishmen and Scots--are loud and boisterous.  But after raising the temperature of the story to a fever pitch there is no cathartic violence to release all that pressure.  Instead of one of these excitable Irishmen resolving the plot through physical activity, the demon, who has no dialogue or personality, just carries off Vrolok's soul and the sorcerer collapses. 

(I can't pin this on Howard, of course, but it is also odd and something of a let down that the illustration features a woman whose breast is bared but there is no sex in the story.  The illo suggests the demon is going to try to seduce or molest or rape Evelyn, but nothing like this happens in the text.)

We also might consider this, like Williamson's "The Wizard's Isle," a yellow peril story, as Vrolok is strongly associated with the mysterious East--he is wearing a Chinese silk dressing gown with a dragon pattern on it when Kirowan and O'Donnell burst in on him, for example.

Acceptable, but not one of Howard's better works, in my opinion.    

"The Colossus of Ylourgne" by Clark Ashton Smith

"The Colossus of Ylourgne," which is one of Smith's stories of Averoigne, the French province in which all manner of supernatural events take place, is actually illustrated by Smith himself, which is fun.  This story seems to have really struck a chord with practitioners of the weird, as there have been two sequels to it written by other authors, one by Brian McNaughton in 1995 and another by Peter Rawlik in 2014.

In 1281, six years after moving to the cathedral city of Vyone, the squat little wizard Nathaire and his pupils disappear from that town, nobody is sure why or how.  Later in the year, the corpses of recently dead young men begin busting out of tombs and cemeteries all over Averoigne and marching to the abandoned castle Ylourgne in the hilly eastern reaches of Averoigne.  Two brave monks investigate the diabolical goings on at the ruined castle, and find Nathaire directing some tremendous undertaking by his pupils and a veritable army of demons and familiars.  The monks are detected by the dwarfish Nathaire and humiliatingly ejected from Ylourgne by two corpses that are possessed and animated by demons. 

One of Nathaire's former students, Gaspard du Nord, investigates the castle himself, and discovers the horrific, almost unbelievable truth!  Nathaire and his satanic followers are processing the dead bodies of young men, separating the bones from the flesh and, somehow, reconstituting the bones into gigantic bones and then clothing the titanic bones with the flesh of the dead.  Nathaire is creating a man a hundred feet tall!  After Gaspard is captured and dragged before the little wizard, Nathaire explains how this colossal figure will be animated--old and ill, Nathaire will soon die, and his soul, thanks to spells cast by his pupils, will inhabit the gargantuan body, in which Nathaire will wreak havoc upon Averoigne!

Gaspard is thrown into a dungeon full of bones and snakes, but manages to sneak out through the drainage system and witness the animation of the giant.  He flees home to Vyone as, behind him, the giant, shouting obscenities, devastates the countryside and inflicts a long list of atrocities upon the people of Averoigne.  Finally, in the cathedral town, Gaspard is able to muster enough sorcery to neutralize the giant.    

This is a terrific story about necromancy, full of grotesque and gruesome images and Smith's extravagant metaphors and esoteric verbiage:

Gaspard, returning from his plunge into Lethean emptiness, found himself gazing into the eyes of Nathaire: those eyes of liquid night and ebony, in which swam the chill, malignant fires of stars that had gone down to irremeable perdition.

Very good!  A weird classic!          

"The Colossus of Ylourgne" was the favorite story of readers of this issue of Weird Tales, and has been reprinted not only in the expected Smith collections (I read it in an electronic library copy of A Vintage from Atlantis: Volume Three of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith) but various anthologies.

For the record, in Before the Golden Age (on page 729) Asimov says that the stories in Weird Tales were "fearfully overwritten" and that the style of H. P. Lovecraft,    "the author most typical of Weird Tales," "revolted" him.

At the time of writing, the wikipedia page on Frank Belknap Long includes an image of the sexalicious cover of the 13th issue of Donald A. Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader, a periodical that reprinted old stories and ran for 18 issues from 1947 to 1952.  Those blonde bombshells are hard to resist, and seeing as the MPorcius Fiction Log staff has been investigating the writing of Long anyway, we have the perfect excuse to give in to their charms.  With the help of everybody's favorite website, the internet archive, let's flip through this 1950 magazine and read stories Wollheim thought worth reprinting by people whose names we recognize.

(Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 also reprints Donald Wandrei's 1932 "Raiders of the Universes," which we talked about back in 2017.)  

"The Body-Masters" AKA "The Love Slave and the Scientists" by Frank Belknap Long (1935) 

"The Love Slave and the Scientists" first appeared under its less salacious original title, "The Body-Masters," in Weird Tales, alongside stories by Robert E. Howard (one I've written about), Edmond Hamilton and August Derleth.  Wollheim here in Avon Fantasy Reader suggests it is a serious science fiction story, asking the question of how science might help solve the problems of loneliness and stale marriages, and how people might react to a scientific resolution to their sexual relationship problems.  Sounds good--I've got my fingers crossed! 

Long sets his tale in the 57th century, a time when high divorce rates are a major cause of concern for the authorities.  The "Dictator of Emotional Arts" diagnoses the problem: men want variety in sex partners, but when a man cheats on his wife, she gets jealous.  So a means is found to allow men to experience novelty in their sexual relations that will not arouse their wives' jealousy--sex robots!  No sensible woman would be jealous over a machine, the men of the world reason.

The plot of the story follows a surgeon, V67, who embraces the idea of the "Mechanical Companions," and spends his free time with one, relieving tension and introducing variety into his love life.  As we follow him from the "garden" where the Mechanical Companions are to be enjoyed to work and then  home, we learn a little about life in the 57th century, like the mass transit system of the future and the way the government uses eugenic breeding and surgery on the glands of excitable people to keep the population docile.  Back home V67 gets a surprise and we get our predictable twist ending--V67's wife is being visited by one of the newest line of sex robots, Mechanical Companions built in the form of men with the purpose of improving the lives of women who are bored with or ignored by their husbands!  V67's liberal attitude about Mechanical Companions goes right out the window and he destroys the masculine robot in a fit of rage!

The "points" of the story seem to be that both men and women are responsible for relationship problems and that no government, no matter how invasive and tyrannical, can do much to change human nature.  As my father learned that time he suggested to my mother that they watch a Gloria Estefan concert on TV, and I learned when I suggested to my wife that we watch a Sophia Loren movie, women really will get jealous over a machine, and men are probably no better.  I can't argue with Long's themes, but I can't say that they are surprising or exciting, either, and I also can't say his prose style, pacing or atmosphere are anything better than serviceable. 

We'll judge this story, which isn't doesn't quite wear out its welcome, to be merely acceptable filler.  For some reason Leo Margolies chose "The Body-Masters" for his 1964 anthology of stories from Weird Tales, which was also printed in a (truncated) German edition.

"The Curious Case of Norton Hoorne" by Ray Cummings (1921)

Norton Hoorne was one of the world's great concert pianists.  In this story our narrator, music lover Dr. William Manning (a medical doctor, not an Ed.D. or whatever) and one of Hoorne's best friends, tells us the heretofore secret truth about Hoorne's death!

The year is 1900!  Manning and another of Hoorne's closest friends, Dr. Johns (also a medical doctor and not a doctor of education or something), are called to Hoorne's beautiful Manhattan flat on Riverside Drive by his distraught housekeeper to find their buddy in a cataleptic state!  The musician doesn't seem to be breathing, and he has no pulse, but there is no positive sign he is dead, either.  Johns has an inkling of what is going on.  You see, just a week ago, Hoorne told Johns that he (Hoorne) had developed a new kind of music that could facilitate the departure of his soul from his body so he could travel in the astral plane!

The two sawbones do some detective work and experiment by playing the piano--by tickling just the right ivories Manning can bring Hoorne's soul closer to his body so he can, haltingly, talk to them--and solve the mystery.  Hoorne was in love with one of his pupils, the beautiful blonde daughter of a rich financier, but said moneybags wanted his little girl to marry some English baron, rendering the dreams of these piano-playing lovebirds null and void.  Just this morning, the docs discover via their sleuthing, that Hoorne's sweetheart was found dead by her family--the docs suspect she is not really most sincerely dead, but just travelling the astral plane hoping to be reunited with Hoorne!  Hoorne tried to join her on the other side, but something went awry and his soul is still anchored to his body.  With Manning's help at the keys, Hoorne completely severs his ties to this mortal realm and joins his beloved in some other universe.

Acceptable filler, I suppose.  "The Curious Case of Norton Hoorne" made its debut in Argosy and was only ever reprinted in the Avon Fantasy Reader.  

"The Thing That Walked on the Wind" by August Derleth (1933)

This one debuted in Strange Tales alongside stories by Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard and has reappeared in several Derleth collections and some odd theme anthologies, like one that collects SF stories by non-Canadians set in the Great White North, another about the Wendigo, and one full of stories about Ithaqua.  (You'll remember I read a story by Brian Lumley about Ithaqua, "Born of the Winds.")  I guess Derleth invented Ithaqua, but based it on Algernon Blackwood's story "The Wendigo."

Wollheim comes right out in his intro to the story in Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 and admits "The Thing That Walked on the Wind" is a pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft and Blackwood, and Derleth lazily mentions these big names in his story, waving his inspirations in our faces.  Derleth's tale, like so many Lovecraftian stories, consists of documents like official statements, testimonials and/or newspaper clippings.  This time out the primary frame is the statement of a Mountie, division chief John Dalhousie; most of Dalhousie's statement is a reproduction of a report from Constable Robert Norris; Norris in turn includes some brief newspaper stories in his report.  Norris, Dalhousie tells us, disappeared soon after submitting that report, and his body was found in a snow bank seven or eight months later.

In February of 1930 the entire population of the little town of Stillwater mysteriously vanished.  Exactly one year later, Constable Norris was near Stillwater and saw something moving in the sky--three bodies then fell to the earth near him, one that of a dead woman, the other two men who still barely clung to life.  The men turned out to be guys who were visiting Stillwater on that day everybody vanished.

By interrogating one of these guys, Allison Wentworth, when he briefly wakes up before dying, as well as the local doctor (of medicine) called upon to examine these three airborne Canadians, Norris learned that the people of Stillwater worshipped an air elemental, Ithaqua, going so far as to dedicate human sacrifices to this monster.  Wentworth and his friend had the bad luck to arrive in Stillwater the night of the big sacrifice; when they tried to rescue the sacrificial victim, a young woman, the monster was so angry it carried away all the inhabitants of Stillwater as well as the two would-be-heroes!  Wentworth and his friend were held captive by Ithaqua up in the stratosphere for an entire year, and accompanied the monster on its journeys around the world, visiting Ithaqua-worshipers in many occult (like R'lyeh or the Plateau of Leng) and mundane (like London or Lebanon) locations.  The year long world tour over, Wentworth and his pal were gently left on the Earth's surface, doomed to die in the warmth because Ithaqua had changed their body chemistry to be more suitable to the cold of the upper air.  (Don't ask why they didn't die in London or R'lyeh--Ithaqua works in mysterious ways!)  Wentworth informed Norris that since he too had glimpsed the air elemental, Ithaqua would no doubt kill him as well.    

After Norris's report, Dalhousie presents the evidence that Norris was also taken around the world by Ithaqua for some months before being left to die in Canada.

The core plot of this story is standard and obvious, but classic stuff that a good writer struck by inspiration and willing to put in some labor can turn into a fun and/or striking piece of fiction.  Derleth unfortunately buries that workable core under layer after layer of dry frame story and does nothing to add emotion or excitement to the traditional framework he is working with--he doesn't tweak or subvert or embroider the standard-issue plot at all, and his style and tone are bland.  None of the characters have personality or motivation, there are no memorable images, Derleth doesn't create any atmosphere or paint a picture of the setting, etc.

"The Thing That Walked on the Wind" is a formulaic, by-the-numbers Lovecraftian story to which the author adds nothing new or special.  Barely acceptable filler. 

"The Street That Wasn't There" AKA "The Lost Street" by Clifford Simak and Carl Jacobi (1941)

The famous coronavirus, the mass looting and rioting, and the increase in violent crime in cities we have witnessed in the last year or so have had me thinking about Clifford D. Simak's foreword to Roger Elwood's 1973 Future City.  (You can read Future City at the indispensable internet archive.)  Simak suggested that the city had outlived its usefulness--it was full of crime, commuting to it was an expensive hassle, and you could do all your work from home via electronic communication anyway--so maybe the city was doomed to extinction as people fled urban life for the suburbs and rural areas.  I have to wonder if Simak's prediction might not be coming true.

But I digress.  Wollheim says that "The Street That Wasn't There," which first appeared in the short-lived magazine Comet under the title "The Lost Street," is a "fascinating mental game" and a "really off-trail story" that is based on the tension between the foundational philosophical concepts of materialism and idealism.  Our man Wollheim is a real salesman!

It is the horrible future world of 1960!  The Old World of Europe, Asia and Africa are wracked by war and plague, and these blights are beginning to afflict South America.  But American Johnathan Chambers knows almost nothing about the world crisis--he's been a recluse who refuses to read newspapers or listen to the radio for like twenty years.  Two decades ago he published a book on metaphysics that was so revolutionary his colleagues and the public hounded him out of the university!  This victim of cancel culture lives alone and talks to nobody; every night he takes a 45-minute walk on the same route at the same time, and all his neighbors have learned to not bother addressing him, even the store clerk who sells him a cigar every night at the exact same time.

But tonight Chambers gets home and looks at his watch to find he has come home 15 minutes early!  How did this happen?  Chambers lives by the clock; for years and years his walks have always begun at precisely 7:00 PM and ended precisely at 7:45!  Also, somehow, he forgot to buy his cigar!  

The next day Chambers figures out the psyche-breaking and world-shattering truth.  That career-ending book he wrote twenty years ago posited that the world is the way it is because our minds force order upon matter--that bunch of molecules over there takes the form of a tree because we all expect it to be a tree, that bunch of molecules over there is an automobile because we expect to see an automobile there, etc.  Pushing this already dumb idea all the way out to la-la land, Chambers suggested that aliens from another dimension who had superior brain power could impose upon our universe their own vision of what our world should be like, and this way take over our dimension.  So the next night when Chambers goes out on his walk and realizes that the block with the cigar store has simply vanished he realizes that his speculation of an alien invasion has come to pass!  The world war and global plague that have yet to reach the United States must have killed off so many people that there are no longer enough human brains to enforce their will on this universe's matter, giving those evil aliens an opportunity to start crafting our matter into a world more suited to them!  (Or maybe twenty years of not talking to another human being has just driven Chambers insane?)

Chambers rushes home as the world around him changes.  There is no hope, smh, soon his house will vanish like all the other houses, and he will vanish like all the other Earth people.  Chambers knows that matter is never destroyed, only changed, so the molecules that are now him will soon be something else and he wonders if in his new form he will have consciousness or be a mere inert object.  

Better written and better structured than the rest of the stories I have talked about today, but still not exactly good; I guess I can give "The Lost Street" a grade of "OK."  "The Lost Street" has appeared in numerous Simak collections as well as a 1940s anthology edited by August Derleth and a 1970s one edited by Terry Carr.

**********

I'm feeling wishy washy today; I'm not comfortable definitively praising any of these stories or consigning them to the junk heap.  I have lost my passion...why should I need to keep it since what is kept must be adulterated?

Let's look for some fun in the back of the magazine!

In the back pages of Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 are some pages of ads, one of them listing dozens of Avon paperback books.  Some of these books are serious literature, what we might even call classics, like D. H. Lawrence's The First Lady Chatterley and A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (we all love "When I Was One and Twenty," don't we?), and many are respectable mainstream fiction, like the works of W. Somerset Maughan or Howard Fast, or respectable genre literature, like the novels of Raymond Chandler or Cornell Woolrich ("William Irish" is one of Woolrich's pen names; I read I Married a Dead Man before I started this blog and I guess I liked it OK, though I remember very little of it; I actually remember the Barbara Stanwyck film of the novel more vividly.)  As you might say of Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 itself, the cover art of many of these publications seems to indicate that Avon saw as its target market those in search of salacious material.  Below I have reproduced some interesting specimens of such art.

As I write this, you can see several pages from the Naughty 90's Joke Book at an ebay auction  here (scroll down) and judge how many belly laughs it might have provided

       

Four luscious women and one sinister man sounds like a good recipe; maybe I'll read the edition of Bloch's The Scarf available at the internet archive soon

So many questions...