Echoes of Ambrose

If an evil fate cast me back in time to the late 1930s, and I were compelled to join one of the factions emerging in the tempest-filled teapot of early sf fandom, I would probably side with the Futurians. They were a bookish lot, forward-thinking on class and gender, as a rule, and insisted so hard that science fiction should be better that they actually made it better. A good share of the best writers of the 1950s were Futurians (e.g. Judith Merril, Frederik Pohl, C.M. Kornbluth, Asimov in his last worthwhile period), not to mention editors (Donald A. Wollheim, for instance, but also less heralded names like Larry Shaw and Robert A. Lowndes), agents (the aforesaid Pohl, and the more successful Virginia Kidd), and an artist or two (e.g. Hannes Bok, also a gifted writer), not to mention the first serious critics of science fiction, who were also notable for their own fiction: Damon Knight and James Blish. They were unquestionably a force for good.

And also, possibly, a force for bad. There is a counter-current in American sf from this period, one less concerned with correctness, maturity, and literary standards, one that embraced science fiction’s identity as a form of fantasy with technological furniture, one that embarrassed serious people with its ridiculous paintings of brass-brassieres covering pulpy pages awash with adventure fiction.

Great writers emerge from this tradition, too: Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett, Ross Rocklynne, etc. (Nobody remembers Ross Rocklynne nowadays, except weirdoes like me, but he had some great moments.) But they didn’t win Hugos (if we exclude retro-Hugos, as I think we should).

Part of this is due to timing: the pulps, strictly speaking, were dying or dead by the time the Hugos got under way. But part of it is shame. Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton and other heroic pulpsters went on publishing widely read adventure fiction in the 50s and afterwards; it just wasn’t the kind of thing that was respectable enough to garner awards. And the case could be made that Bradbury was the most important writer of sf in the 1950s, one who burst through genre limits and gained the much-coveted respect of the literary mainstream. But he was too clearly a fantasist to be taken seriously by the serious people of 1950s science fiction.

Confessional sidebar: I kind of hated Bradbury as a teenager, or thought I did. On the other hand, I read a lot of him. As an adult I can look at Bradbury and see clearly the childishness in his work that both repelled and appealed to me. At his best, Bradbury’s naivety is a strength that allows him to see the nakedness of emperors, and also the wonders/horrors that clothe the world. At his worst, it’s a squeaky affectation.

Of the Futurians, no one was more Futurian than James Blish. Behind his false whiskers as “William Atheling, jr.”, he was a harsh and demanding critic of science fiction. In propria persona he published fiction widely in the 1950s, frequently selling to John W. Campbell’s Astounding, a market impenetrable to many a Futurian.

He was also a relentless hack. I’m not even talking about the Star Trek books (which helped keep the show alive in the now-distant days when home-video and streaming markets didn’t exist). He was a publicity flack for the Tobacco Institute, a lobbying/marketing group whose activities led to many people’s deaths (including, ironically, Blish’s own). He wrote a sword-and-planet adventure novel, Sword of Xota (later reprinted as The Warriors of Day).

And he published a couple times in Planet Stories, pulpiest of the pulpier sf/f pulps.

As critics, Damon Knight and James Blish normally sang in harmony, but there was at least one issue they disagreed about: the type of sf written by A.E. Van Vogt. It involves throwing at the reader constant twists and turns, new events, new characters, new ideas until the reader shouts, “This must be good!” (or just shuts the book and does something else). Blish called it the “intensively recomplicated” plot, and held that it could be done well. Knight called it the “kitchen sink” plot and was doubtful (although he did attempt one when he was in his 40s, Beyond the Barrier).

Blish’s Okie stories (collected in Earthman, Come Home) are intensively recomplicated stories (as Knight noted in reviewing them), but so are the two pulpier fictions Blish published in Planet Stories. Because I came across it first, I’ll talk about the later one, “Blackout in Cygni”, from the July 1951 issue. After I discuss Blish’s story, I’ll say a few words about the rest of fiction in the issue. Spoilers for these 70-plus-years-old stories follow.

Blish’s “Blackout in Cygni” is fairly ridiculous. It has a stalwart space hero, villainous space pirates, a glamorous space princess (or the equivalent), a shocking plot twist and a surprise ending. (Those last two are different, here.) It won’t make you feel different about humankind or enable you to see new colors in your soul. But the stock elements of the story work, I think, because of Blish’s dedication to the intensively recomplicated plot—his confidence as a writer, that he can pull it off, and his confidence in the reader, that they’ll be able to keep up.

Our hero is Dirk Phillips, first officer of the interstellar space-liner the Telemachus. The ship’s lower decks are packed with immigrants “in Supercargo” (which I think of as an officer in charge of cargo, not a place on a ship; it’s not clear whether Blish is unaware of this usage or if he just doesn’t care). But we find our hero stalking through D-Deck (for upper-class passengers) after getting off from a shift in the control room. Dirk hates these rich passengers and wishes the upper decks could be peeled off the ship and left behind.

But the ship is facing other dangers than class conflict. (Or is it? Hold that thought if you read the story.) A space pirate known only as Jason has been preying on the spacelanes that the Telemachus is spacelining. Nobody knows how Jason grapples with his prey in subspace; it’s supposed to be impossible.

On top of that, there’s another terror in space: darkness. Crew and passengers in spaceships whose lights failed on interstellar journeys through subspace have gone mad, the ships returning only with “a cargo of madness and death.” The cause is not fully known, but the symptoms can be treated: fail-safe nightlights powered by safe, friendly radioactivity are installed throughout modern starships, and the standard procedure is for the ship to drop out of subspace if lights fail.

Faster than you can say “As you know, Bob”, the Telemachus is afflicted with a blackout. Plus, the nightlights that are supposed to keep people from going crazy fail. Someone has replaced them with lights powered by fallible electricity, not good old reliable radioactivity.

Dirk figures it out, as you have probably already figured it out: the pirate Jason has an agent on the starships he attacks. This agent engineers a blackout at a given point in the journey; the ship drops out of subspace; Jason and his cutthroat crew pounce on the ship they’ve been waiting for once it appears in normal space.

The questions that emerge as Jason’s craft approaches the Telemachus are: who is the hidden agent of the space pirates? And: can something be done to defend the ship from the pirates? These questions will be answered; the day will be saved; the good guys will live happily ever after. It’s that kind of story. The secret villain in, interestingly enough, a politically powerful media mogul who wants Earth’s new colony to fail, because he fears it will diminish his power.

Is the story worth reading? Maybe. It’s pretty short, given all the stuff that happens in it; the pace is brisk. The nightmarish moments of the blackout have a certain power, although they might have more if they had a little more space in the story. The mystery is resolved interestingly, if not 100% plausibly, and the space-princess (technically just a newscaster who is also the daughter of a bigwig on the governing Centrale Council) displays significant agency; she’s not just a prize for the hero. If you like efficiently told, deliberately old-school space adventures, or if you’re interested in Blish’s work, then yes: read this thing. If not, then maybe not.

One of the features of Roman comedy (think: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) is that little-to-no time is spent on character development. The audience knew the stock characters before the play began: the senex (old man), the matrona (Mrs. Senex), the adulescens (dopey young lover), the amica (sweetheart of the adulescens), the leno/lena (pimp), and most importantly, the low-class character who is smart enough to solve the problems the upper-class people can’t solve for themselves: the servus callidus (clever slave) or parasitus (parasite). The entertainment lay in the complicated, fast-moving stories the poet could get these familiar characters into. The intensively complicated sf story (whether by Van Vogt, Blish, or Charles Harness) has satisfactions something like Roman comedy.

Blish’s other story in Planet is a lot weirder, but I’ll talk about that another time.

The longest story in this issue is Poul Anderson’s “The Virgin of Valkarion”.

Anderson is the old-school sf writer with the widest range, in a bunch of ways. In 1951, he was already one of the most promising young writers in the Silver Age of John W. Campbell’s Astounding, and had a couple of different future histories in hand (which would eventually coalesce as “The Psychotechnic League” series and “The Polesotechnic League”/”Terran Empire” mega-series), and he was soon to blossom as one of the great writers of heroic fantasy in the 20th century with towering and influential work like The Broken Sword (1954) and Three Hearts and Three Lions (serialized 1953; book version 1961).

The quality of his fiction varies wildly, too. He was one of the great writers of mid-century sf/f, but his writing wasn’t always great.

This one is not Anderson’s very best, but it’s not his worst either. In it, Anderson is engaged in unabashed space opera, with a flashier, splashier style than the sedate, gray pages of the middle-aged Astounding would allow.

What’s it like? It’s like this.

“Tonight, so spake the Temple Prophecy, a sword-scarred Outlander would come riding, a Queen would play the tavern bawd, and the Thirty-Ninth Dynasty should fall with the Mating of the Moons!”

The setting is an unnamed planet with two moons and a medieval level of technology. Our hero, Alfric, is the sword-scarred Outlander of the prophecy. He’s coming to the capital city of the Empire of Valkarion to find employment when he’s attacked by assassins sent by the Temple of the Two Moons. He defeats them and enters the city, wondering what the powerfulTemple priests have against him.

The last descendant of the imperial line is a woman, Hildabord, and in this savage period (1950s America, I mean) women weren’t considered capable of ruling. The High Priest of the Temple, Therokos knows this is the time of the prophecy. He figures that it means barbarians (like Alfric) will come in and extinguish the Empire. His plan is to do away with Hildaborg and rule as Theocrat. But Alfric and Hildaborg fall in together (I bet you didn’t see that coming) and backed by her Household Guards Alfric defeats the Temple’s minions and by the next morning is well on the way to establishing the 40th Dynasty by marrying Hildaborg.

No surprises here. The conduct of the story is mostly pretty competent, if generic.

One scratch from the poisoned missile of the southern blowguns was enough to kill a man. Alfric yelled and flung his hengist at the brush. The sword whined from its scabbard, flamed in his hand.

A hengist is a kind of horse. (Hengist means horse in Old English, but Anderson doesn’t expect his audience to know that; this is just the “call a rabbit a smeerp” principle in action.) By “flung” the narrator seems to mean that the hero rode hard at the brush that was concealing the blowgun-wielding assassins. That’s not so great. But there’s a touch of poetry in the description of the sword, and some of the other descriptions where Anderson is scrabbling to make emotional contact with the reader, sometimes successfully. But Alfric is not a particularly memorable hero—just a cut-rate Clonan. Anderson could and would do better.

The lead novelette of this issue is by an old favorite of mine, Ross Rocklynne.

Rocklynne first appeared on my radar via his story “Time Wants a Skeleton” from the heroic age of Astounding Science-Fiction. Harrison and Aldiss included it in The Astounding-Analog Reader and it kind of blew my mind.

I kept my eyes peeled for Ross Rocklynne books, and soon found an Ace paperback, The Men and the Mirror. Years later, I found his The Sun Destroyers, as half of an Ace Double. And that’s it, apparently–all the Ross Rocklynne books there are or likely to be, unless some public-spirited publisher takes on the project of The Collected Ross Rocklynne.

Rocklynne’s story in this issue of Planet is not a lost classic, but it does have its interest.

As the title “Slave Ship to Andrigo” might suggest, this story is about some sinister cultural practices. It’s kind of a noir-in-space story. The viewpoint character, Hawk Stevens, is a scumbag who crashed out of the Space Academy five years earlier. He’s now the captain of the Selwyn, a spaceship full of scumbags, the scumbaggiest of which is a pious fraud named Corpin. Their business model involves going to a planet called Andrigo, abducting a bunch of the natives (who are intelligent plants), and selling them into slavery.

The problem: the Andrigans or “Greenies” are somewhat telepathic—enough so that they can spot someone who’s approaching with hostile intent; then they scatter and can’t be found.

The solution: Johnny Single, Hawk’s one-time sidekick at the academy. Johnny stayed in school, graduated, got the girl—Hawk’s girl, or so he’d thought—and went to work at a straight job. But now Johnny’s out of work and comes to Hawk for a job on his ship. Hawk gives him the job, because he’s the perfect catspaw for the Greenies. They won’t suspect anything, as long as Johnny doesn’t know anything.

The kidnapping of a shipload of Greenies goes off without a hitch. But that’s the moment smarmy hypocrite Corpin has been waiting for. He and his gang inside the crew pull off a mutiny. From that point on it’s Hawk and his disillusioned friend Johnny against the rest of the crew. They’d be doomed except for two things: Hawk’s knowledge of his own ship, on the one hand, and on the other the Greenies, who unexpectedly hold the balance of power in the struggle.

The end of the story finds the Greenies safely back home, the mutineers kicked off the ship, and Hawk on the road to something like redemption.

Like I said: not a lost classic, but morally complicated in a way that old-school space opera doesn’t usually get credit for being.

I’d never heard of Dave Dryfoos before reading “Sign of Life” and after a glancing at his ISFDb page I didn’t know much more. He published a couple dozen stories between 1950 and 1955 (of which this is the third) and then seems to have disappeared from the science-fiction firmament. (The Science Fiction Encyclopedia has a little more detail, but not much.)

This is a pulp tragedy. The main character is going to die, as the writer helpfully tells us in the story’s fourth word. He’s George Main, lone survivor of Earth’s first expedition to Venus, but not destined to survive long. Their mission was to find out if there was life on Venus. Main discovers that there is, but a kind of life so strange that he has trouble recognizing it. When he does, he spends the rest of his brief life getting them to recognize that he is a kind of life—so that someone or something will survive as a witness to the life and death of Main and his shipmates.

Not a bad story; I’ll certainly read more from Dryfoos, although there doesn’t seem to be much more. Writers come and go; it looks like Dryfoos was a promising writer who left the field before his promise could be fulfilled. Maybe he went into advertising, or some other spiritually rewarding occupation.

“William Morrison” (the pseudoplume or nom de nym of Joseph Samachson) was a much more prominent sf writer in his day than Dryfoos ever was; he wrote a couple of Captain Future novels, some standalone novels of his own, and a long run of stories from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. But until I read this story (and then looked at his ISFDb page), I had never heard of him. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The situation in this story: Earth colonists on Mars are in terrible danger from giant predatory animals much like monsters. The solution, when it arrives unexpectedly, is obvious in retrospect: you get a monster of your own.

I ended up liking this story, though it strained my patience a couple of times. It sometimes reminded me (not in a good way) of George O. Smith’s Venus Equilateral stories, in which there is much space devoted to the dumbness of managers. On the other hand, I’ve had to deal with some clueless managers myself. Is there any upper limit to human stupidity? Contemporary history suggests otherwise.

Also, by the end of the story it was less like Smith and more like Clifford the Big Red Dog. I’ll be keeping an eye out for Morrison’s name or pseudonym in future forays into the past.

I have not read much by J.T. M’Intosh, but I have yet to read anything by him that was worth the trouble. That includes this story. De gustibus non disputandum.

Frank Belknap Long was a long-lived and prolific writer of sf/f, and his name was familiar to me, but I don’t think I’d read anything of his before now.

“The Timeless Ones” is maybe a little long for the thin story it tells, but there’s some (not wholly unsuccessful) attempt at establishing an air of mystery and danger. FBL got his start writing Lovecraftian horror and it shows here (in good and bad ways, I think).

The story involves Ned and Cynthia Jackson, a husband-and-wife team in command of the “contact rocket, Star Mist“, whose job it is to make a circuit of recent colony worlds and check on how they’re doing. They’re returning to a “green world… five thousand light years from Earth” which FBL never names, unless I missed it. They’re looking forward to seeing one family in particular, the Sweeneys, who had the kind of settled, peaceful life that the Jacksons have come to envy in the ten years since their last visit.

They land on the green world, but there has been no growth in the colony since they’ve left. On the contrary, most of the colonists have disappeared, probably died; only the Sweeneys are left. Since the Jacksons last saw them, they have not aged, including the children. There’s something odd about the Sweeneys’ mental state, too, and they have miraculous abilities, like teleportation and walking through walls.

It turns out that they’ve developed a symbiotic relationship with an alien race they refer to as “the Green People”, who are somehow identified with the Druids of Celtic Europe. (By the authority vested in me as a PhD in Classical Studies, I hereby state that the historical and cultural content of the story is pretty weak—about pulp standard, I guess.) Anyway, the other colonists did not develop a similar relationship and now they’re gone. Burned in Wicker Men, for all I know.

The Jacksons decide not to report back to Earth and instead go to join the Sweeneys in symbiosis with the Green People, where they will find a house already waiting for them

It was designed for gracious living; but whether the Druids, in their inscrutable wisdom, wished mankind well or ill, who could say?

I feel as if it’s Long’s job to say, but on this inconclusive note the story ends.

Not one for the reread list, I think, but I might have a look at Long’s other stuff sometime.

Now we’re talking. The next story, “Temple of Han” is by one of the greatest sf/f writers of the 20th century, Jack Vance. This is early work, a little rough around the edges, but is a solid fantasy adventure with some futuristic furniture—classic space opera.

Our hero is a rogue named Briar Kelly. (That’s not a typo.) He lives in an Earth colony on a world (which Vance does not name) fifty light years from Sol. The dominant species (which Vance also does not name) doesn’t like the “Earth-things” (as they refer to human beings), and there is no obvious reason why they should. Kelly, for instance, has snuck into the temple to their god Han and stolen a green jewel which they were planning to offer their god in a once-in-seven-years ritual.

Before you can say YAGLA, some unknown mystic force has thrown the planet across the universe, so far from Earth that the colonists are now helpless against the locals. The locals start to murder the colonists on an hourly basis unless and until their jewel is returned.

Kelly may be a thief, but he’s not completely worthless, and he goes back to the temple with the jewel to offer himself up to the locals’ justice and revenge. The chief priest is prepared to accept the jewel and Kelly’s life, but does not propose to spare the lives of the other “Earth-things”. He explains to Kelly how serious the infraction is: the hard-won jewel was slated to be taken through a magical—I mean highly scientific portal to the Place of the Gods, where it would be received by Han himself.

Kelly takes the jewel and crashes through the portal himself; he confronts Han among the other YALGLAs who inhabit the Place of the Gods. With his own cunning and bravery, and a lot of help from one of the YAGLAs who doesn’t like Han, Kelly triumphs and returns to the nameless planet, now in statu quo ante except that the locals can’t call on Han anymore, as there is no Han anymore.

I guess this means they can now be safely crushed under the boots of thieving Earthfolk. Vance was not the kind of guy who worried about that sort of thing, although some space operators did (e.g. the Rocklynne story in the present issue, or editor Jerome Bixby’s story “Small War”, which would appear in Science Fiction Quarterly a few years later).

The central conceit of this story (mundane man goes through portal to confront strange gods) re-appears in Vance’s Cugel story, “A Bagful of Dreams”. The latter story (eventually folded into Cugel’s Saga) benefits from more than a quarter-century of Vance’s experience in writing fantastic adventure about scurrilous characters. But the earlier story is still worth a read or two.

Mack Reynolds is one of the more baffling figures of mid-century science fiction, at least to me. He almost invariably got hold of really interesting ideas for his stories. For instance, what would happen if African-Americans did as bigots were constantly proposing and went back to where they (or their ancestors) came from? That’s the subject of Reynolds’ El Hassan series, a post-colonial nightmare or fantasy. Interesting, but I can’t recommend it as fiction. Or: what if corporate warfare were literal, not figurative, fought by mercenaries under strict rules and broadcast as entertainment? That’s the subject of Reynolds’ Mercenary from Tomorrow. Interesting, but I can’t recommend it as fiction. Or…

But maybe you see where I’m going here. Reynolds always has an interesting idea. But I’ve yet to read anything by him that I feel I could hand to a friend and say, “This is good. You’ll like it.”

That includes the present story, “Mercy Flight.” In it, a spaceship pilot named Phil Mooney has recklessly lifted off from Luna to bring a sick girl to an Earth hospital before she dies. But his radio has failed: it can broadcast but not receive. A disastrous crash-landing seems imminent, but is avoided by the efforts of a great many people. The last page of the story has Mooney congratulating himself on his heroism and self-reliance—blissfully unaware of the many people who made his happy landing possible.

This story is the sound of Reynolds biting the hand that frequently fed him: John W. Campbell jr. JWC loved stories of tough, self-reliant heroes, and Reynolds just didn’t buy that crap. He was a card-carrying Socialist who looked at his present and any possible future with a critical eye.

I just wish I liked his fiction better. It’s talky, not well-written, and full of cardboard characters. But if you wanted to give his work a try, this would be a relatively painless sample.

OK. Uff da. If I’d known how long this was going to take, I might not have ventured on it. Kudos to you for plowing through it all. (If you didn’t, of course, you’ll never see this.)

There’s another Blish space opera banging around in the ether of my imagination these days, but I’ll talk about it (and its issue of Planet Stories) another time.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.