Month: February 2020

Fever isn’t such a New Thing

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In a galaxy crippled by incompetent bureaucracy, poorly worded orders unleash a plague on the planet Pharona – a plague which affects only women, and makes them emit cosmic rays while they die slowly.  Called on to enforce a quarantine over Pharona, disgraced spaceman Ben Sholto intercepts an escaping ship – only to find that it contains his old flame Sally Hale, and that she has the plague.  Sholto defies orders to rescue her and find a cure.  Of course, this means that the full weight of galactic officialdom is brought to bear on Sholto, while the plague itself continues to rage….

Murray Leinster’s novelette “Plague” appeared in the February 1944 edition of Astounding.  Leinster was an old hand at this sort of SF by this time – he was a prodigious writer of short fiction for the pulps – and “Plague” has lots of stuff that would appeal to the average Astounding reader; space opera elements as ships hurtle across the void, technical detail as Sholto identifies the mysterious “plague” (a living cloud of electrons that feeds off female life force – look, just go with it, OK? If we start to pick holes in it, we’ll be here all day) and comes up with a cure (involving electronics rather than medicine), generous helpings of pure exposition, and lots of rather heavy satire about incompetent galactic bureaucrats.  Sholto’s battle with the plague is overshadowed by his conflict with the bureaucrats who are determined to execute him for insubordination…. I suppose Leinster deserves some credit for the resolution, though, which involves Sholto coming into contact with a bureaucrat who isn’t incompetent, outranks the incompetent ones – and is infected with the “plague”, which means she’s a woman.  Women in that sort of position of authority were still relatively rare in Golden Age SF.

So it’s reasonably inventive, calculated to please its intended audience… it’s also, I’m afraid, rather slow and repetitive; Leinster repeats the details of the situation over and over, it’s almost like he was being paid by the word or something…. Still, it’s a polished performance by an experienced pulpsmith, which isn’t such a bad thing.

Life in the Slow Lane

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The first interstellar mission to Alpha Centauri is a qualified success – preserved by the Eternity drug, three out of the four crewmen have survived the centuries-long journey.  They arrive to find that the first faster than light mission to Alpha Centauri was also a success, as were several hundreds of others…. Strangers in an unfamiliar future society, and cut off from the rest of humanity by physical changes over the centuries, the three men take a modern starship off on a tour of the universe – and then one of them has an idea…

A.E. van Vogt’s short story “Far Centaurus” appeared in the January 1944 edition of Astounding.  It’s, well, a bit of an oddity.  Many an author would have stopped at the revelation that the slower-than-light travellers had been beaten to their destination; van Vogt, being van Vogt, immediately heads off in a new direction.  The spacemen are lauded as pioneers, but can’t function in the future society because metabolic changes in humanity mean they now have (from the future people’s point of view) massive body odour – they can, however, absorb all the interesting developments in science, like “adeledicnander”, the power source derived from the psychology of electrons, and new ideas in cosmology like “bachelor suns”, which don’t allow anything to orbit around them.  Of course, much of today’s science would sound like gibberish to a man from five hundred years in our past; it would be churlish to suggest that van Vogt’s future science sounds like gibberish because it is, in fact, gibberish.  (Just call me a churl.)

However, one of our heroes works his way through the gibberish, and has an idea.  He takes their new-fangled starship into orbit around one of those bachelor suns; the sun refuses to permit such a thing, and the play of cosmic forces conveniently spits the ship out several hundred years into its own past, just a few years after they left Earth – an Earth to which they can now return, and live normal lives.

Van Vogt frequently writes as if he has no idea where his story is going, but fortunately he doesn’t care either.  Most of the time, I fear, this works about as well as you might expect – sometimes, though, as here, the story blunders into a more or less satisfactory conclusion.  (Don’t try and claim it was on purpose, van Vogt.  I’m on to you and your little game.)  “Far Centaurus” may have cardboard characters and rubber science, but the story ends up in a place that makes sense, and I suppose it deserves credit for that.

Red and Yellow and Pink and Green

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The first man to land on Venus, Kilgour arrives in an idyllic landscape – and suddenly finds an object, a crystal cube with a handle, that informs him telepathically that it’s… a can of paint.  Investigating, Kilgour accidentally splashes himself with the paint, which coats much of his body and can’t be removed.  He is being tested by the inhabitants of Venus, and if he fails the test, he will die – covered in multi-coloured paint….

A.E. van Vogt’s short story “A Can of Paint” appeared in the September 1944 edition of Astounding.  By van Vogt’s standards, it’s a pretty straightforward story, most of it concerned with Kilgour’s desperate but colourful plight – he spends a lot of time contemplating the essential properties of an ideal paint, trying to figure out a way to get the stuff off him.  His eventual success is a little bit contrived, it seems to me, but “a little bit contrived” is actually quite good for a van Vogt story, where the resolution is more likely to come out of nowhere…. The voice-only telepathic Venusians are a typically van Vogt touch, as are the bogus celestial mechanics (rocket flights to the Moon and Mars are routine, but ships travelling to Venus will inevitably miss and fall into the sun unless Jupiter is in the right position.)  Still – it’s a readable enough story, and I found it easy enough to empathize with the unfortunate Kilgour – I genuinely wanted to see him get out of his bind, and that’s a sign of a good story, in my book.

The Man who Counts

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Census-taker Grant, travelling near the Webster estate, is surprised to meet Nathaniel, a talking dog.  The Websters have been labouring under a burden of guilt for decades, after Jerome Webster let the Martian philosopher Juwain die.  Thomas Webster designed the space drive that is now taking his son Allen to the stars; his other son, Bruce, is working on dogs like Nathaniel, trying to create a new sapient species to share the Earth with humanity.  But Grant is on the trail of something else – possibly a non-human species that is already there.  Strange and novel ideas have been coming into circulation, suggesting some new and different minds at work.  And Grant hears rumours of a man who doesn’t seem to change as the years pass by, a man who appears out of nowhere and fixes things….

Clifford D. Simak’s novelette “Census” appeared in the September 1944 edition of Astounding: it’s one of the stories in his “City” sequence, fitting in between “Huddling Place” and “Desertion”, and it introduces several elements that would recur throughout the sequence – the talking dogs, and the mutant Joe, who creates a civilization of ants.  All this and the return of the Juwain philosophy, the Webster dynasty, and the ever-present robot butler, Jenkins.  Although it’s got the warmth and humanity you’d expect to find in Simak’s personal brand of pastoral SF, it’s actually quite a sinister story.  The exiguous and weakening grip of Simak’s largely absent world government allows lots of people to slip through the cracks, including the mutant Joe – telepathic, brilliant, almost immortal, and completely unfettered by human morality.  Joe derives great amusement from simply turning up unexpectedly and fixing things – he points out a critical flaw in Thomas Webster’s space drive, he fixes Grant’s handy all-purpose atomic gun… and when he finds what he claims is a flaw in the incomplete work of Martian philosopher Juwain, he claims he can fix that too.  But he will fix it in his own time, for his own reasons… and, given the way he treats the ants, those may not be good reasons.

“Census” is very much a pivotal piece in the “City” sequence, and it’s very much to Simak’s credit, I think, that it works as a complete story in itself – though it’s clearly pointing the way to future events (with some red herrings thrown in along the way, like the interstellar expedition).  It’s a solid piece of writing by one of the best SF authors of the time.

Abide With Me

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Carew, from “the Institute”, goes to visit Homer Green – a man for whom Carew clearly has a great respect.  Green is recovering after an experimental treatment which, he thinks, may give his tissues the ability to regenerate, like those of a salamander.  Green thinks the date is September 11th 1943… and is only briefly surprised when Carew tells him the date is August 4th, 2170, and his experimental treatment has worked only too well.

John R. Pierce’s short story “Invariant” appeared in the April 1944 edition of Astounding. It’s a short and rather talky piece which is very, very fond of that word “invariant”.  Green’s experimental treatment has left his whole body – and mind – frozen in the state it was in 1943; his short-term memory doesn’t pass into long-term, so any new information he receives just fades away after a few minutes.  Pierce is obviously interested in working through the implications of this – Carew, a historian, is keen to get information on the twentieth century from an intelligent man who still thinks it’s 1943, but there are other experiments on hand, too, such as getting Green to describe the same thing, over and over again, and charting the ways in which his descriptions differ.  There are all sorts of experiments for which Green’s invariant brain can act as a control…. Pierce is clearly aware of the horror and tragedy of the man’s situation, but he seems to be approaching it primarily from the scientific point of view.

John R. Pierce turned out a handful of short stories over a period of decades, but is clearly more comfortable writing non-fiction (often under his pseudonym “J.J. Coupling”) – he seems to have been the sort of Astounding contributor that John W. Campbell liked, a working scientist with an open mind towards SF ideas.  “Invariant” is a slight piece, and more than a little dry – it’s the sort of story you’d expect a professional scientist to write.  It’s not bad, and the central idea is one of those minor recurring themes in SF (it would be explored by writers as disparate as Brian Stableford and Stanislaw Lem), but it’s too heavy on the exposition to be really exciting.

How Sweet to be an Idiot

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World Manager Carberry comes to see Phy, the General Secretary of the World… to explain the oncoming new order.  Carberry has realized that the people running the unified world state are all insane, in various ways – as the only sane man in a world run by lunatics, he has been able to build up his own organization, and will now be taking over, to handle world affairs along more sensible lines.  But Carberry has failed to realize something essential – and Phy has explanations of his own to offer.

Fritz Leiber’s short story “Sanity” appeared in the April 1944 edition of Astounding.  It’s surprisingly undramatic, concerning an attempted global coup d’état as it does…. Essentially, it’s an extended conversation between the pragmatic and efficient Carberry and the somewhat whimsical Phy – the essential point Carberry has missed, of course, is that in a world run by madmen, the sane man is the aberrant one; the global system is set up to fit the right sorts of insanity into the right job – and it’s all simply been humouring Carberry for ten years, to see if his particular world-view will turn out useful.  When he attempts to take over, though, Phy regretfully consigns him to a rest home in quiet country surroundings.

It’s a fairly lightweight tale, and it’s heavy on the exposition as the two men explain to each other how the world works… it does have some neat touches (for instance, Carberry’s secret police force of paranoids, ever-vigilant but so out of touch with reality that they don’t realise their guns aren’t real), and a lot of Leiber’s characteristic wit shows through.  It’s a minor story, but even minor Leiber is generally fun to read, and this one’s no exception.

The Same Old Witchcraft when Your Eyes Meet Mine

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So I’ve been taking another look at Mandrake the Magician, this time concentrating on the daily strips, which are more conventional three-panel daily stuff, not so text-heavy as the Sunday ones like “The Garden of Wuzzu“.

A total of four stories were completed in 1944 and syndicated through King Features; created by Lee Falk and Phil Davis, Mandrake and his buddies, girlfriend Narda and black strongman Lothar, battle a variety of exotic bad guys.  I have to admit, I’ve rather warmed to Mandrake and his team as the stories wore on – principally because they are a team; while Mandrake’s esoteric powers generally resolve the storylines, he is by no means a one-man band, and is quite often at a disadvantage where quick thinking by one of his companions has to save the day.  (Despite appearances, and his Incredible Hulk style of dialogue, Lothar turns out to be quite capable of quick thinking when it’s needed – it’s a surprisingly positive portrayal of a black man, for the time period!)

The first story is “The Earthshaker”, where Mandrake sets out to the West to visit a friend, Old Sandy – only to find that no one will come within ten miles of his friend’s house, because of the odd noises and the legend of the Earthshaker, a giant a hundred feet tall.  Obvious nonsense… except, when arriving at Old Sandy’s house, they find Sandy himself missing, the new owners distinctly inhospitable, and there are odd diversions like footprints fifteen feet long and giant hands appearing at Narda’s window.  Is the giant real? – Well, of course not; it turns out that Sandy has been imprisoned by a gang of crooks stealing oil from a nearby pipeline; the “giant” consists only of a bunch of props (manipulated, often, by a gangster inside them – leading to a moment where Narda utters one of those great lines to treasure: “Lothar – look out!  The foot’s got a gun!”)

Next, the team are pitted against a criminal mastermind in “The Dome”.  The mastermind is named the Dome because of his high bald head; he wears an all-concealing black face mask, but it turns out there’s nothing much to conceal – he’s a freak of nature with no eyes and no nose.  He’s made up for his obvious disadvantages by training his remaining senses and his intellect to formidable levels… but one result of his disability is that he can’t see Mandrake making hypnotic gestures or staring hypnotically, and therefore Mandrake’s powers don’t work on him; the magician needs to plan very carefully to get ahead of the Dome.  It’s a good exciting storyline with an eminently hissable villain.

Then comes “Doctor Congo”, who presents himself as an actual African witchdoctor, with a bone through his nose, even; he will get rid of anyone who’s in your way, for a fee, using his voodoo magic.  When a wealthy old woman is apparently reduced to a skeleton, Mandrake and his team must step in, only for the magician to be (apparently) skeletonized himself.  Of course, it’s all a scam; Doctor Congo’s capering African spirits are arranged with smoke and a concealed film projector, and the mysterious skeletonization simply involves the victims being kidnapped and a skeleton left behind as a diversion.  (A clever enough tactic for it to be copied in the late Sixties in an episode of Department S, “The Bones of Byrom Blaine”.)  This is one where Narda gets to save the day, Mandrake being unable to make hypnotic gestures while tied up in a straitjacket…. Doctor Congo (who, despite his African features – and that nose bone – appears to be somewhat lighter-skinned than Lothar) eventually is carted away to prison, his victims are liberated, and all is well.

And, after three more-or-less mundane villains, the next story “The Mirror People” goes all supernatural, with Narda breaking a mirror, being told it’s bad luck – and then being attacked by her own reflection.  The people on the other side of the mirror (who are, naturally, evil – more than twenty years before a certain Star Trek episode!) have discovered a fluid which enables them to pass through mirrors and enter our world; cue various attempts at impersonation, lots of worrying about any reflective surface, and a visit to the mirror world, where there are lots of strange reversals; rabbits chase dogs, trees grow upside down, and colour schemes are reversed – the evil Ekardnam wears red evening dress with a black cape, for instance.  Eventually, the mirror people are defeated, but Mandrake and Lothar are dosed with a substance that erases their memories of the incident – was it all just a strange dream Narda was having?  Personally, I hope so – otherwise, with his reflection dead, Mandrake is going to have a heck of a time keeping up his perfectly coiffured appearance.

Actually, that leads me on to the artwork, because Mandrake is quite often less than perfectly coiffured, with errant wisps of hair escaping from the brilliantine after a trying day dodging bullets and leaping out of exploding buildings – it’s a neat humanizing touch, and the artwork on the strip is good enough to enable it.  Mandrake the Magician is actually thoroughly good stuff – the artwork is clear enough to stand reproduction in a newspaper, the plots move along swiftly and are clever enough to be interesting, but not complicated enough to be confusing.  Lee Falk and Phil Davis have accomplished a great deal within their limited canvas, here.

 

Curse your Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal

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Syme Rector, on the run from the law, falls in with scientist Harold Tate, who has discovered something exciting – a possible way of penetrating the force-field dome around the ancient Martian city of Kal-Jmar.  For Tate, it’s an archaeological treasure trove; for Syme, it’s the treasure that’s most important.  Facing the hazards of the Martian landscape and the open hostility of the native Martians, the two men travel to Kal-Jmar….

The short story “Doorway to Kal-Jmar” appeared in the Winter 1944 edition of Planet Stories, under the byline of “Stuart Fleming”, actually a pen name of Damon Knight.  It’s an adequate sort of a story, with a villainous protagonist who – after murdering two people and a host of native Martians – gets an ironic come-uppance when he finally breaks into the lost city of Kal-Jmar.  It does seem to me that it’s got some pacing issues – it starts out fairly fast-moving, then slows down a bit for Tate to deliver his exposition about Kal-Jmar and his gadget for penetrating its force shield, then speeds up a bit again as Syme and Tate go out onto the desolate Martian surface, then slows down a lot as the native Martians deliver telepathic exposition about the history of Mars, their own people, and the decadent people of the domed cities.  After which, there is hardly time for Syme to gun down the Martians, watch while Tate opens the force fields, betray and murder Tate, marvel at how much money and power he will gain from the contents of Kal-Jmar, and then die ironically when a Martian machine, responding telepathically to his feelings of hunger, force-feeds him Martian food which is poisonous to humans.

This is a pretty early item in Damon Knight’s long and distinguished career as a writer, critic and anthologist; it’s clear that Knight is still finding his feet as a writer.  Still, it manages to cram a lot into a small compass, establishing Syme as a thoroughly bad lot and Tate as an innocent abroad, and delivering a lot of information about Knight’s vision of Mars.  It’s just a shame that all the exposition bends the story out of shape.  Still, it’s a good showing from an important writer at the start of his career.

You can Sail the Seven Seas

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A US Navy carrier in World War Two comes under attack in the Pacific.  Nothing unusual in that, except that there is no way of telling where the attack is coming from.  As the carrier’s escorts are relentlessly blasted out of the water, the ship’s commander comes to an awful conclusion: the Japanese have an invisible warship out there somewhere….

Stanton A. Coblentz’s short story “The Odyssey of Battling Bert” appeared in the December 1944 edition of Amazing Stories.   It’s cast as a tall story, told by seaman Battling Bert to a reporter in a bar, sometime after the action… and a tall story, really, is all it is.  The Japanese do, indeed, have a battleship coated in paint which makes it invisible; when an invisible shell lands on the carrier’s deck, an enthusiastic junior officer scrapes some of the paint off it, hastily covers a plane with it, and sends the now-invisible plane off to bomb the battleship to bits.  It seems very considerate of the Japanese to wait while he does all this, but never mind.  (The plane locates the Japanese ship by the “little spouts of smoke” from its guns when it fires.  I inferred from this that Stanton A. Coblentz never served in the Navy, or at least never saw a battleship’s main guns go into action….)

Stanton A. Coblentz was a quintessential writer of potboilers – he produced a substantial number of short stories, short novels, and poems, in a conservative and effortlessly mediocre style.  He was someone you could rely on to fill a page with words… not terribly well-chosen words, but you can’t have everything.  “The Odyssey of Battling Bert” is, well, more interesting than a series of blank pages in the middle of the magazine.  It’s pulp writing at its most routine – it’s not actively bad, it would need some character and some effort put into it to be bad.  It’s just, well, filler material.

Hand Built by Robots

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Agent Rick Weston is sent undercover to Jupiter, to investigate Doctor Farrel’s robot project.  He finds Farrel and most of his staff reserved or downright hostile, with two exceptions – Farrel’s attractive daughter Rita, and helpful Martian scientist Ho Agar.  Farrel has almost perfected his army of labour robots, each one incorporating a tiny slice of a human brain… but, every so often, a robot runs amok, and Farrel’s team has had no luck finding out why.  Rick has his own suspicions, especially when he finds a consortium of Earth industrialists has tried to bribe Farrel into abandoning the project; it’s not random malfunctions, but deliberate sabotage.  And, soon enough, Weston himself is being threatened by rogue robots – but what of the robot who helps him, and who, before being destroyed, scratches a cryptic number 4 on the floor…?

William P. McGivern’s novella “The Mad Robot” appeared in the January 1944 edition of Amazing Stories, and indeed made the cover of that issue, with a very lively Robert Fuqua picture of Weston fending off a robot with his trusty ray gun.  It’s a fast-paced and not particularly challenging adventure story, and proceeds pretty much by the numbers all the way – despite McGivern’s attempts to introduce red herrings, the saboteur is exactly who you think it is, and the helpful robot who protects Weston is easily enough explained, when he’s told, quite early on, that brain tissue from a friend of his was used in one of the robots.  (The friend died in a rocket accident before the story begins, although, if he was anything like Weston, he wasn’t using his brain for anything much before that, anyway.)  There’s a lot of exciting bits with crazed robots and ray guns, but not much in the way of evocative description; Jupiter might as well be Neasden for all the effort McGivern puts into describing this alien world.

William P. McGivern was another of those prolific short fiction writers of the pulp era; he wrote under a number of pseudonyms (in fact, two other stories of his appear in the same issue of Amazing, under the bylines of “P.F. Costello” and “Gerald Vance”), but is largely forgotten today.  On the evidence of this one, he’s a competent but uninspiring pulp writer, easily able to fill the required number of magazine pages with a pretty routine space opera… and, well, that’s about it, really.