My life in books

More novelettes from 1942 pulp magazines.

Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround” is one of the Mike Donovan Robot stories, in which a robot acts strangely and Donovan has to figure out why, and how to fix the problem. Both error and solution usually involve some bizarre circumstances that impacts on the way the robot resolves the tensions between the famous Three Laws of Robotics, and this story falls perfectly into the pattern. A robot with a deliberately heightened sense of self preservation is given a casually worded order to do something that would endanger him. In this case, the two a mathematically balanced, causing the robot to run in circles around the location he was ordered to, while singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Kind of amusing, standard Asimov robot story.

1942 was the year in which Isaac Asimov published the first of the stories that would eventually become his iconic Foundation series. “Foundation” is the origin story, which gives us the basic background to the series, and covers the first “Seldon crisis” - how will Terminus, the remote and relatively isolated home of the First Foundation and the Encyclopedists, hold into its independence as the Empire crumbles? It really was one of the most ambitious concepts of its time, even granting that lots of writers were creating lengthy and complex histories for their fictional universes, from Heinlein to “Doc” Smith. Just one month after “Foundation” appeared in print, the second story dealing with the next Seldon crisis, was published as “Bridle and Saddle.”

1942 also saw the publication of Asimov’s “Friar of the Black Flame,” in which an Earth ruled by the reptilian Llhasinu from Vega are driven from Earth and destroyed by a battle force drawn from all the human worlds. It’s fairly standard milsf, but what makes the story interesting is that it mentions Trantor as one of the human worlds, establishing it as part of the backhistory of the Foundation series.

Alfred Bester’s “The Push of a Finger” is a story of the sort we now associate with the “butterfly effect” - the idea that a butterfly’s wings flapping could a tornado on the other side of the world - though of course it predates that formulation. In a future society where the prime principle is stability, a machine is developed capable of calculating the future - and it predicts the end of the universe in a catastrophic scientific experiment in only a thousand years. The pronosticators use the machine to track back to the one moment that, if changed, can prevent the disaster. There’s a surprise plot twist, of course, which the modern reader will immediately deduce because we’ve seen it too many times, but the story is well told and, I expect, was fairly new and original back in 1942.

Lester del Rey’s novelette “My Name Is Legion” is an example of the “time loop” story, in which the subject is caught in the same sequence of time, looping through the same events. In this story, it’s a defeated Hitler trapped in the loop by a scientist bent on revenge for the deaths if his Jewish wife and children, and it is a particularly nasty loop with an all-too-appropriate end built into it. Quite an effective story.

“Though Poppies Grow,” also by del Rey, is the most powerful of all the war-themed anti-fascism stories I’ve read in the past few weeks, and there have been quite a few of those, what with the US being at war in 1942. In this story, the ghost of the Unknown Soldier from WWI is called forth from his tomb, acting out the promise from the famous poem - “If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.” The writing in this novelette is so evocative, so well-honed, as del Rey follows the young soldier, confused, knowing only that he has a mission, wandering through the streets of Washington, touching people as he passes in various ways. At first he does not know he is dead, a ghost, but slowly as it dawns on him, he is overwhelmed, until at last, he is led to understand his role is to remind these who waver, or are complacent, that there can be no compromise with fascism, with tyranny, with hatred. The story is exquisitely told, the character made so real you can feel his struggle to understand, the message as important today as it was in 1942.

A story in a completely different vein, del Rey’s Lunar Landing s about a mission to the moon, sent in the (faint) hope of rescuing three men from the first lunar voyage. The crew of the Moth - five men and two women - encounter serious problems in landing themselves, and their search for the first ship becomes even more important because they hope to cannibalise it for parts they’ll need to get home themselves. But very little goes as planned in this mission, beginning with the first surprise, plant and animal life adapted for survival on the moon. As I’ve noted elsewhere, del Rey’s style, like Heinlein’s, has aged well. His characters are quite fully and realistically developed, and the two women in the story are intelligent, brave and have lived lives of their own - they have relationships with men, but are not defined solely by them.

Ross Rocklynne’s “Jackdaw” portrays the bewilderment of an alien species on discovering a world where only one living being remains, alone on a planet whose cities, roads and farms have been destroyed by massive bombardment. When the lone survivor dies in a suicide attack on their craft, they are bewildered, but despite their best attempts, the end of the species and the actions of its last member remain incomprehensible to a species that cannot envision war.

“QRM—Interplanetary” by George O. Smith is a cautionary tale of what can happen when you put a businessman whose only focus, and area of expertise, is cost-cutting, in charge of a facility that depends on scientific and engineering excellence to function. QRM, we are told, is the shortwave code for man-made interference in radio transmission. The story takes place in a communications relay station on an asteroid whose orbit is positioned such as to ensure radio transmission between Earth and Mars at all points of both planets’ orbits. The man-made interference is a new Director who knows nothing about either the technical aspects of communication, nor the intricacies of life in an artificially sustained environment. The consequences of his policies, while humorously described, are disastrous. Eventually, the proper order is restored, but not before his decisions come close to killing everyone on the station.

1942 was the date of E. Mayne Hull’s first published work, a haunting novelette called “The Flight That Failed.” Set during the war, it’s the story of a time traveller who tries to avert the destruction of a plane crossing the Atlantic with a secret cargo that will change the course of the history he knows if it gets through.

Fredric Brown’s “The Star Mouse” is a rather poignant tale about a mouse who is shot into space in a small experimental rocket built by your standard eccentric tinkering scientist. Mitkey, as he’s been called by the professor, and his rocket come to the attention of a civilisation of very small people living on an asteroid that happens to be passing near earth. Concerned about potential threats from humans, they explore Mitkey’s memories to find our what they can about human civilisation - but doing this involves giving Mitkey intelligence equal to that of humans. Mitkey goes home again, but alas, the boost in IQ doesn’t last. Still, he survives, is reunited with his mate, and the professor provides him with lots of cheese.

In Jane Rice’ “Pobby” a writer of horror starts a new story - his idea is to tell a gruesome tale of a poor farmer named Pobby who finds a strange seed, plants and waters it, hoping that it might grow into a rare flower that will make him some money, only to be eaten by it once it flowers. As he starts to write his installments for magazine publication, however, someone named Pobby, who looks and talks like the character he’s writing about, appears to various of his friends, saying he needs to find the writer and get him to stop making him grow the flower, because he doesn’t want to die. Finally, Pobby and the writer meet face to face, but the writer persists in following his story - until he finds himself in a writers block just before the final scene. Frustrated, he travels to the lace where he has set Pobby’s farm, finding the town much as he’s written it, with characters he’s mentioned, and Pobby’s farm, where he discovers the cause of his block - Pobby, out of desperation, has written his own ending to the story. An interesting exploration of the conceit that characters can take on a life of their own.

“The Magicians’ Dinner,” also by Jane Rice, is a comic ghost story about a young bride, married to a magician, who tries to handle a dinner for forty in their first home, when she’s never cooked before. Fortunately for her, her family’s long-dead cook decides to return from the other side to save her firmer employers’ daughter’s bacon, so to speak. The tale is told in first person, the narrator is rather self-depreciating and quite engaging and likable, so that the story comes across as light-hearted and sweet. We will pass over the class issues and the trope of the help who care more for the families of their employers than they can for their own, and some if the annoyingly sexist assumptions about how marriages between men and women should work.

In Rice’s “The Elixir,” the narrative voice is again a somewhat unconventional woman, a out-spoken, accident-prone, unmarried writer of mystery novels. In this light-hearted time travel yarn, Amy Parrish’s equally unconventional neighbour, Clare Holloway, throws a Halloween party and Amy decides to attend as a witch. While waiting for the party to get started, Amy mixes up a batch of punch, tossing in liquor, ice cream, and halloween candy, while reciting some off-the-cuff doggerel, and ends up in Salem during the witch hunts. Much strangeness ensues, but all ends well, with Amy back in her own time, wondering if everything happened as she recalls it, or if she was just drunk silly and hallucinating. Having read several of Rice’s stories now, I must say that I am quite delighted with her descriptive style, which is both unique and very apt, and her mastery of tone. It’s a pity that her work is not remembered nearly as well as that of other writers of this era.