My life in books

I’ve already done posts about the novellas and novelettes I read in looking for potential nominations for the 1943 Retro Hugos. Now, it’t time for the short stories.

Leigh Brackett was a master of the planetary romance, stories about strange beings and ancient civilisations on other planets, and the adventurers, some heroic, some cynical and world-weary, who explored them. In the short story “Child of the Sun,” her hero, Eric Falken, a rebel fighting for the survival of free men against a tyrant who enforces Happiness on humanity and rules a docile populace, discovers a hidden planet inside the orbit of Mercury, and a vastly ancient energy being who wants amusement - human toys to play with. Falken must outwit the creature to gain the planet as a hiding place for the rebels.

“Child of the Green Light” is another of Leigh Brackett’s short stories, this one about Son, the only survivor of a space ship crew trapped by a mysterious green light, which is the manifestation of a part of another universe penetrating our own. Under the influence of this light, he has changed, his atoms altering frequency. Eventually, he will be able to cross over to the other universe, where a woman is waiting for him. But then another ship of humans arrives, and he learns that the light is affecting all life in the solar system, slowly killing the human race, and he must choose between the woman he loves or the survival of a human civilisation he barely remembers.

Lester del Rey’s “The Wings of Night” is a haunting and emotionally powerful story about the last member of a once advanced civilisation living in a refuge created when the moon began to lose its atmosphere. As the soil is depleted over time of an element necessary for reproduction, it seems inevitable that Lhin, the last of his species, will die alone. Until a distressed space freighter carrying two humans makes an emergency landing on the uninhabited moon and, by accident, triggers the landing doors to Lhin’s underground world. The story examines - and condemns - issues of prejudice, colonialism, exploitation and slavery, and ends with hope for both Lhin and the hearts of men.

It may be pushing the boundaries somewhat, but Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Funes, His Memory” - also known as “Funes the Memorious” - is certainly a tale of the fantastic, a story about a boy named Funes who suffers an accident which leaves him crippled, but with a memory so intense, detailed and complete that he amuses himself by inventing a number system in which every number up to 70,000 has its own name. Borges turns the simple recollections of a man who met Funes a few times into a meditation on the varieties and purposes of memory and forgetting.

Heinlein’s short story “Pied Piper” is a slight piece of work but nonetheless entertaining. There’s a war, and as always, one side is losing. The leaders of the losing side turn to their greatest scientist for a weapon to help them win the war. Instead, he proposes a way to end the war, forever.

Isaac Asimov’s “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray” is one if the Robotics Corporation stories, this time about a robot programmed for construction work on the moon that somehow ends up in rural Virginia, where a general purpose repairman finds him and tries to make a few quick bucks off his discovery. It’s a comedic story, light in tone and mostly just for fun.

Malcolm Jameson, writing as Colin Keith, produced a charming little capitalist comedy called “If You’re So Smart—“ about a scientist frustrated by a greedy robber baron who controls pretty much every major business on Titan and is trying to close down his research so he can a quire it cheaply. Determined to resist, the scientist figures out how to use his new machine to take over all the industrialists holdings, destabilising the solar system economy in the process. Humorous and well-written.

Jameson’s “The Goddess’ Legacy” is a rather different work. Set in Nazi-occupied Greece, the story’s narrator, an American businessman, encounters a remnant of the cult of Pallas Athene, and is witness to her continued legacy of protection for her city and people.

L. Ron Hubbard’s Strain is a truly gut-wrenching story about what a person will endure in war for the sake of his country, his fellows, his mission, but it’s the ironic turn at the end that turns the whole thing inside out and makes you think about the ethos and the military culture. Psychologically adept, well-written, painfully graphic treatment of a difficult subject.

The Embassy, written by Donald Wohlheim under the pen name Martin Pearson, is a twisty little story about what might happen if someone decided that Martians had set up an observing mission somewhere in New York City, and hired some not too imaginative private eyes to track it down.

And, from a writer I don’t remember hearing about at all, F. Anton Reeds, with a bittersweet story called “Forever Is Not So Long,” about an English scientist in 1931 working on time travel. He decides to run the first trial, to travel forward a decade - and learns things that change his priorities fir the rest of his life.

“Deadlock,” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, writing under the name Lewis Padgett, is an interesting variant on the mad robot story. The Company has been working on developing robots for some time. The ultimate goal - an intelligent, indestructible robot capable of solving any problem. The problem they keep running into is that the robots keep going mad, and being indestructible, end up being encased in tombs of concrete. Finally, they develop a robot who remains sane - but as it turns out, that’s even worse.

Moore and Kuttner - writing again as Lewis Padgett - produced another robot story in 1942, “The Twonky,” a very unsettling story about a temporarily temporally displaced mechanical technician from the future who, while suffering from amnesia, spends an afternoon working in a radio factory until he recovers, realises his situation and goes back to wherever he came from. He’s not otherwise important to the story. The problem is, that where he comes from, he makes Twonkies - robots programmed not only to do household tasks, but to censor the cultural exposures, and manipulate the impulses of their “owners” - removing individuality, creativity, initiative, and terminating those who persist in their wayward ways. The story leaves the reader hanging, having shown us what Twonkies can do, with a Twonky loose in the 20th century and waiting for the next unsuspecting customer. Sf horror at its finest.

“Later Than You Think,” written under Kuttner’s name alone, is one of those stories about a person who, in some fashion, finds a way to learn tomorrow’s news today. In this story, it’s a sales clerk in a record store whose hobby is tinkering with radio equipment, who accidentally builds a radio that plays tomorrow’s news. Unfortunately, he and his radio fall into the hands of a gangster, who forces him to use it to make money for the gangster by various nefarious means. All ends well, however, and the boy gets the girl and finds a way to use his radio without causing too much mayhem.

Kuttner’s “False Dawn” is an interesting tale of unintended consequences. An egotistic and immoral scientist has developed a process that regresses life forms through the stages of evolution, and decides to use his discovery to get rid of his financial backer by regressing him to amoeba status. The plan backfires when it turns out that human evolution has a rather longer history than anyone realised. Kuttner builds some nice ironic turns into the story.

Writing under the name Kelvin Kent, Henry Kuttner penned a series of light-hearted time travel adventures featuring a roguish chap named Pete Manx. “Dames is Poison” sees Manx in renaissance Milan, getting mixed up with Cesare and Lucretia Borgia.

“Kilgallen’s Lunar Legacy” by Norman L. Knight is a Bunyanesque story about an Irishman, his will, a dozen replicas in spaceborne coffins and a buried legacy of unique proportions. Tongue in cheek humour.

Fredric Brown’s “Etaoin Shrdlu” is an updated version of the sorcerer’s apprentice - this time the enchanted machine is a sentient linotype machine that can set anything in a fraction of the tine that the process normally takes, and that demands to be kept working. The solution - teach it Buddhism, so that instead of running its operator ragged, it meditates and achieves nirvana. Yes, it’s Orientalist as fuck.

In “The Shoes”, Robert Bloch plays with the old idea of bargaining with the devil for eternal life. Everyone who tries it thinks he can outwit Satan, and the little man who calls himself Dr. Faust is no exception. But everyone leaves out something that trips him up in the end, and here too, Dr. Faust is no exception.

Fritz Leiber’s “The Sunken Land” is a Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story, which means classic sword and sorcery adventure. This time the two soldiers of fortune are out fishing when Fafhrd finds a relic of a long lost sunken country in one of the fish as he cleans it. The relic leads to a dreamlike experience for Fafhrd as he seems to relive a voyage of his ancestors to the doomed island before it sank.

Jane Rice’s “Idol of the Flies” is a disquieting portrait of Pruitt, a child without empathy or conscience, the sort of child we now understand to have a profound psychological disorder. A child of some wealth and privilege, he hates the people around him, using his position to torment, ridicule and abuse the servants in the household. And he tortures small creatures. Pruitt has a particular fascination for flies. Indeed, he has created a ritual in which he commands the help of a supernatural being he calls the Idol of the Flies in his schemes to harm others. It’s unfortunate - for him, at any rate - that Pruitt doesn’t know all the names of the Lord of the Flies, nor his true nature, until much too late.

Hannes Bok is primarily known as an illustrator, but he also produced some speculative fiction. In “Letter to an Invisible Woman” Bok’s protagonist addresses a woman he has fallen in love with, a woman who has a secret that makes her different, who has abandoned him because he has discovered it. He pleads with her to return, but the story does not give us her answer. Or perhaps, it does.

Henry Kuttner's novel The Creature from Beyond Infinity was originally serialised in 1940 - as A Million Years to Conquer, which is a much better and more accurate title - thus making it eligible for the 1941
Retro Hugos. Which is why I read it. It was published as The Creature etc. in 1968, which means I probably first read it back then - indeed, some aspects seemed vaguely familiar to me.

So... The story concerns Ardath, the last member of a dying race from a doomed planet, his ship downed on earth millions of years in our past, his mission to wait In stasis until intelligent life develops, then select the brightest of the race in various time periods, hopping in and out of stasis with his specimens, and then breed them into a super race, and recreate the splendour of his own long-lost civilisation on Earth.

The plan goes terribly wrong when one of his first specimens turns out to be a power-mad and brutal, but crafty, barbarian who acquires Ardath's scientific knowledge and conceals the fact from his 'benefactor,' waiting for the chance to seize control of Ardath's orbiting space ark and use its advanced capabilities to conquer the planet.

That time comes in the mid-20th century, when a super genius named Steven Court, studying anomalies of all kinds to try and solve the mystery of a mysterious plague before it becomes widespread, locates Ardath's ship in orbit and builds his own to go see who's been observing humanity.

It's a very 40s kind of story, fast-paced and full of manly men and beautiful 'girls,' with atomic power being the cure for everything, and an unquestioning belief that eugenics and super-intelligence will bring us a bright new world - though Kuttner, perhaps due to his close working relationship with C. L. Moore, acknowledges that women can be super geniuses too, and that coldly intelligent men need to waken their emotional sides to be truly great.