Review: Weird Tales, edited by Leo Margulies

Weird Tales, edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid, 1964, pb, 155pp.) R-1029

“Introduction”
“The Man Who Returned” by Edmond Hamilton
“Spider Mansion” by Fritz Leiber, Jr.
“A Question of Etiquette” by Robert Bloch
“The Sea Witch” by Nictzin Dyalhis
“The Strange High House in the Mist” by H. P. Lovecraft
“The Drifting Snow” by August W. Derleth
“The Body-Masters” by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.
“Pigeons from Hell” by Robert E. Howard

‘Tis the season to be crawly, so I thought I’d review something in keeping with those spirits the day before Halloween. Weird Tales is a selection of stories published between 1931 and 1942 in the magazine of that name. The selection is credited to Leo Margulies, a publisher and editor involved with several SF magazines, but was (appropriately enough) ghost-edited by Sam Moskowitz. Presumably, Moskowitz also wrote the uncredited three-page introduction, which describes some of the history and character of the magazine, as well as the short introductions to the author of each story.

Being Weird Tales, the magazine included SF and fantasy as well as horror and two of the less successful tales in an otherwise very successful anthology represent those categories. Long’s 1935 story, “The Body-Masters,” is set in Cosmopolis in the year 5678 with a protagonist named V67 who is a Gland Surgeon. Seems almost everyone in this (dys|u)topia is a doctor, some of whom essentially vivisect maladjusted people with the aid of a strange pseudo-anaesthetic. This milieu and its robot mistresses are used to explore the atavistic emotion of jealousy and the notion of ideals. In one sense, this is a bad story but it is strangely imaginative and tackles a theme in a way that brought to mind Robert Silverberg’s “The Throwbacks” which, oddly, I just posted here though I reviewed it long ago. Almost half of Dyalhis’ long fantasy, “The Sea Witch,” is given over to repetitive descriptions of the nude woman an old man finds coming out of the sea on a dark and stormy night. Much is made of her archaic knowledge and speech but the narrative style is at least as archaic. Finally, the tale of magic revenge in a literally Byzantine plot unfolds in the second half after mixing New England, Norse myths, and reincarnation. I can see how some might enjoy this tale, but I didn’t.

While you could stretch “The Sea Witch” to fit some notion of horror, it’s essentially a fantasy as told. H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Strange High House in the Mist” also requires some stretching, though less so. Even leaving aside the magazine it was published in, it’s a very weird tale in which nothing much happens and it’s all told in a very mannered way but that achieves a sort of mesmeric effect conveying an awe-fulness symbolized by the unforgettable “strange high house in the mist” which the protagonist strives to reach. Moving more definitely into horror, Bloch’s “A Question of Etiquette” also deploys its style to good effect. Through the eyes of a census taker who has been drugged by the witch he had the misfortune to interview, we witness the wild night of her Sabbat and his strange fate. The narrator’s tone, which moves effectively from black comedy to phantasmagorical fear without varying the same basic pitch, is remarkable.

Several stories, such as “Sea Witch” and “High House” are New England tales and/or snowy. Derleth’s “The Drifting Snow” is another of them. In it, through an aunt who doesn’t like the curtains on one side of the house to be opened and a niece-in-law who feels a compulsion to open them, we learn a family secret from the past which led to a very strange sort of revenant who entices more to join her number. Aside from that, this is an oddly pleasant tale of a family get-together. Strange, but fairly effective. Another snowy story is Hamilton’s piece about “The Man Who Returned.” John Woodford wakes to find he’s been buried alive. The opening horror gives way to a strange inversion of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the irony keeps on ironing. It’s odd that a man so sick he’s been taken for dead is so vigorous in this tale which is also overly reliant on coincidence but it’s otherwise pretty effective and, despite being reminiscent of Poe, is also unusual. Leiber’s “Spider Mansion” is another tale that has some echoes of Poe (and is the sort of thing which, dammit, Janet, had its influence on The Rocky Horror Picture Show). With its “Negro” servants and psychologically twisted midgets, its obviously not a contemporary story but when a couple arrives at the creepy house of a person they think they know one dark and stormy night, the host, a midget-turned-giant via the superscience of his brother, hosts a morbid dinner and regales them with his own diabolical “genius.” Meanwhile, another horror lurks about the house and grounds and things must culminate in damsels in distress, swordplay, and fire. While an element of the ending can be made plausible, it takes some work and the title gives away what is held as a reveal in the story but this is otherwise fine, freaky stuff.

While the anthology is good as a whole, Howard’s tremendous “Pigeons from Hell” wrecks the grade curve. The second-longest tale of the book opens with two New Englanders on a jaunt to the South ending up spending the night at a deserted mansion. One wakes up from what he tries to convince himself was a nightmare only for things to go from bad to worse, resulting in a mad dash from the house. I don’t want to spoil even the opening section but perhaps some flavor of what happened can be given by quoting a piece from when the surviving traveler, Griswell, returns to the house with Buckner, the local sheriff.

He swung the beam around, and Griswell had never dreamed that the sight of the gory body of a murdered man could bring such relief.

“He’s still there,” grunted Buckner.

In the second section, the two men meet with a voodoo man and fill in some details of what Buckner knew of the sordid family history of the mansion’s last inhabitants before moving to the final section and the nightmarish showdown with a “zuvembie” monster. My only complaint with this story is that the first section is so powerful that the remainder, while also powerful and maintaining suspense and interest, can’t quite match that opening. The Leiber, for instance, is very good, but is quite fantastic from the start, which may not allow some readers to get into it and the superscience may be effective for some and a distraction for others. This tale’s prosaic opening and initially very basic horror works much more certainly. Lovecraft’s style, for instance, works very well for his tale but Dyalhis’ (at least for me) was fatally damaging. This story skips any possible problem with that and just tells its tale. Again, with the Dyalhis, the disparate mythological pieces don’t mesh that well for me whereas this tale’s antebellum relics and imported voodoo fit superbly. Highly recommended.

Links: 2019-10-25

Science Fiction

• On Books | Asimov’s Science Fiction. In the course of “The Incredible Shrinking Blog” I tried to explain why I was reorienting this blog and no longer pointing people toward contemporary magazines. Ironically, I have to point people toward an article in a contemporary magazine because the brilliant Norman Spinrad (of impeccable New Wave leftist credentials) explains this far more eloquently than I could. While he is probably far too generous to all three books he reviews, his overall thesis resonates with me completely. A book on Campbell tells us that “rather than Campbell’s or anyone else’s political or cultural passions, any of us on any side who take [“political, cultural, sexual, and literary [and scientific] matters”] as thematically serious are all ipso facto ‘Campbellian’ writers.” A book of award winners by “science fiction” writers themselves, “were hodge-podges of fantasy and science fiction written by writers who didn’t seem to have a clear understanding of what made science fiction science fiction and fantasy fantasy, and can only fairly be called ‘SF,’ or worse, ‘Sci-fi.'” which “tells us that fantasy has long since come to dominate SF. It tells us that many or perhaps even a majority of these SF writers do not have the education or indeed the inclination to learn the difference between science fiction and fantasy and to dish the result out to a populace that has more than enough confusion about the difference between reality and magic already.” A hard SF novel gives him an opportunity to extol science fictional virtues and to conclude with the question that “the field” has already answered in one way and which I have answered in another.

  (By the way, I’ve long championed the notion of giving Spinrad a Grand Master but I realize that he’ll probably never get one because he doesn’t “stick to rose-colored platitudes and SFWA’s self-congratulations” and that’s okay, because he would only add luster to the award which it can no longer add to him.)

Science

• How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe? | Space.
• Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction: Dark matter nightmare: What if we are just using the wrong equations?
• Mars Soil Is Very Weird, the Mole’s Struggles Show | Space.

Other

Politics

• Read Bill Taylor’s Opening Statement for Impeachment Inquiry | Time. It’s long, but not as long as our new national nightmare.
• Russia’s Putin and Turkey’s Erdogan Agree to Carve Up Kurdish-Held Syria. From Ukraine to the Middle East and beyond, as America retreats, the Psoviets advance.

Humor

• The Art of Darkness » Seen Online. I have to quote this one outright:  “No one ever talks about how an oubliette implies the existence of a larger, and far more terrifying, oobly.” –Brainmage

Music

As foreshadowed in the last “Links” post, here’s some live Dead (and more) from the dead who yet live.

Review: The Expert Dreamers, edited by Frederik Pohl

The Expert Dreamers, edited by Frederik Pohl (Doubleday, 1962, hc, 248pp.) LCCN: 62-11295

“Introduction” by Frederik Pohl
“At the End of the Orbit” by Arthur C. Clarke [aka “Hate”]
“On the Feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Stations” by O. R. Frisch
“A Feast of Demons” by William Morrison (Joseph Samachson)
“The Heart on the Other Side” by George Gamow
“Lenny” by Isaac Asimov
“The Singers” by W. Grey Walter [excerpt]
“The Invasion” by Robert Willey (Willy Ley)
“To Explain Mrs. Thompson” by Philip Latham (R. S. Richardson)
“Adrift on the Policy Level” by Chandler Davis [aka Chan Davis]
“The Black Cloud” by Fred Hoyle [excerpt]
“Chain Reaction” by Boyd Ellanby (Lyle and William C. Boyd)
“The Miracle of the Broom Closet” by W. Norbert (Norbert Wiener)
“Heavy Planet” by Lee Gregor (Milton A. Rothman)
“The Test Stand” by Lee Correy (G. Harry Stine)
“Amateur in Chancery” by George O. Smith
“The Mark Gable Foundation” by Leo Szilard

Frederik Pohl’s introduction to this 1962 book begins by talking about how remote science has become from the layman’s perceptions and common sense, moves on to talking about how science fiction is aptly named because it is fiction infused with the sensibility of the scientific method, and concludes by talking about how yesterday’s science fiction reader has become today’s scientist and how that cycle will continue. Along the way, he cites Sturgeon’s law which indicates that 90% of SF is trash and has the corollary that that is unremarkable because 90% of everything is trash. Fortunately, though not everything in this book is gold, it defies any specific application of Sturgeon’s law. Of the fourteen stories in this collection (leaving aside the excerpts of novels by W. Grey Walter and Fred Hoyle) I recommend four and little of even the remaining 71% is trash.

Several of the 71%, especially early on, fall into a couple of classes and some of each of those classes share a common attribute. In the “more science fictional” class and having the attribute of reading well even if they don’t ultimately succeed, I’d place Arthur C. Clarke’s “At the End of the Orbit” and Boyd Ellanby’s “Chain Reaction.” The former deals with a spacecraft coming down in the ocean (a motif repeated in “Heavy Planet”) where a Hungarian diver with a hatred for Russians develops a plan to exact vengeance on the cosmonaut inside. While the narrative is intense and interesting, an element is clearly contrived and the whole thing plays on sentimentality. The latter involves a group of scientists visiting a colleague in an insane asylum. That man has been committed because he claimed to have calculated that the end of the world would be brought about by the experiment they are all involved in. That experiment has just taken place and they’ll all find out whether the “mad scientist” could have possibly been right any minute now. The scenario is compelling but I have to wonder if this is how the other scientists would spend what might be their last day on earth and there is a far more severe problem with the end which I can’t reveal without spoiling it.

Remaining at least somewhat science fictional but being less interesting from start to finish, George O. Smith is not represented here by any superb “Venus Equilateral” story but by “Amateur in Chancery” which is much like several recent SF stories I’ve read lately in that it depends on a scientific organization being indistinguishable from anarchy and involves a character who is almost literally “too stupid to live.” A sort of jump gate is established from Earth to Venus and a woman impulsively pilots a vehicle through it. Seeing a native Venusian, she assumes the atmosphere must be breathable but is rendered comatose when she exits the vehicle, doomed to die quickly but not so quickly that our scientists back on Earth can’t try to figure out how to explain to a primitive living under clouds the concepts of “left and right” so he can press the correct button to return her to Earth. All this is communicated via a telepathic human girl. There are some nice points about frames of reference and common assumptions but the story obviously constructed to make these points is deficient. The one story in the book I have a hard time finding anything good to say about is George Gamow’s “The Heart on the Other Side.” A man must win the hand of his girl by proving to her shoe-manufacturing father that his theories about there being Moebius regions on Earth is correct and, to do so, he takes a shipment of right-shoes to the Amazon to turn them into left-shoes which will help the father’s business because demolishing pre-existing methods of production and replacing them with trips to the Amazon will somehow be more economical. On his return, the suitor believes he has failed, so throws away all the shoes but discovers something on his return. This seemed more like a very old romance story with a wide streak of silliness than SF.

Speaking of things that don’t seem entirely like SF, the “more fantastic class” includes “A Feast of Demons” by William Morrison, which may be talking about entropy-reversing particles but refers to them as “demons” which contributes to the fantastic feeling. The tale of people aging backwards is strangely interesting until the end, which is probably intended to be humorous but is definitely anti-climactic. Similarly, Philip Latham’s “To Explain Mrs. Thompson,” which examines the difference between describing and explaining, also maintains interest as it takes the reverse approach and deals very matter-of-factly with the apparition of a man’s dead wife in telescopes pointed towards Andromeda with tension rising as the phenomenon comes closer to the Earth before the tale reaches its anti-climax. On the other hand, I never engaged with W. Norbert’s “The Miracle of the Broom Closet,” about a remarkable and devout janitor at a lab in Mexico contributing to an odd interplay between science and religion.

Moving to Pohl’s frequently occupied bailiwick of satire, “Adrift on the Policy Level” by Chandler Davis didn’t initially grab me or even ultimately overwhelm me, but did become more clearly pointed and funny as it progressed through its Kafka Americana narrative of a scientist recruiting a worldly brother-in-law to aid him in his quest to win the favor of The Powers That Be by playing the required social, bureaucratic, and self-deluding games that the suitor only dimly comprehends. The twice-twisted conclusion is effective. Leo Szilard’s “The Mark Gable Foundation” opens with the narrator perfecting his suspended animation technique and committing to travel 300 years into the future. He says, “I thought my views and sentiments were sufficiently advanced, and that I had no reason to fear I should be too much behind the times in a world that advanced a few hundred years beyond the present.” He changes his tune when he is awakened a mere 90 years into his journey to find a world in which having teeth is no longer socially acceptable but making a living as a sperm donor is. This 1961 story turns out to be a satire largely pointed at the moves in the late 1940s to establish a National Science Foundation. Its thesis is that making scientists become grant-chasing bureaucrats will lead to the stultification of science through safe and fashionable pursuits (and, as much as I support coherent public commitments to science, I have to admit the validity of his critiques). That aside, this would also make a timely read for today’s sufficiently advanced and morally perfect humans. While perhaps not a “satire,” O. R. Frisch’s “On the Feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Stations” is certainly satirical and an example of the sub-genre of “science fiction stories written as science fact articles.” As such, it’s lacking in fictional qualities but the notion of a future atomic-powered society discovering the radical notion of burning coal to supply power has its interest.

The last set is made up of stories which are both excellent and fully science-fictional (except one which is even further away from fantasy in being almost mainstream). Isaac Asimov’s “Lenny” is a Susan Calvin robot story in which a robot is “born” malformed through a fluke and doesn’t operate as designed but can learn. This story (not the greatest of the robot stories, but a good one) tackles several issues from the Heinleinian motif of “specialization is for insects” to methods of increasing interest in science to corner cases of the Three Laws but also focuses on Susan Calvin, herself. Asimov is not usually given credit for characterization (and didn’t take it, himself, arguing that ideas were more important in SF) but Susan Calvin is a significant and complex character creation, not least in gender terms. Created in the 1940s as a fiercely intelligent, independent, and scientific woman, she is sometimes portrayed as “unfeminine” while simultaneously having “intuition” and other supposedly feminine characteristics. Either way, this complexity is part of why she’s such a remarkable character and comes into play in this story.

Robert Willey’s “The Invasion” deals with a mysterious alien invasion in which a ship settles down and takes possession of a hydroelectric power plant. One man uses good old-fashioned engineering, sticktuitiveness, and professionalism to attempt to thwart their mysterious but deadly designs.

Similarly, Lee Correy’s “The Test Stand” involves a professional man in an era of safe rocketry narrating his experiences as a younger man when it was not safe. When a test firing failed, he and a co-worker were put into a situation which was akin to defusing a bomb, made all the more nerve-wracking by the fact that the man’s wife and child had come to see the experiment. The man learns something about himself and his job. In terms of dramatic plot and psychological effect this is reminiscent of Lester del Rey’s “Nerves” and is excellent and, being published in 1955, its subject of rockets certainly puts it into the category of very-near-future-SF but the story’s one flaw is that it could be written about literally having to defuse a bomb with much loss of science-fictional interest but little other change.

Finally, Lee Gregor’s “Heavy Planet” reads a bit like “Hal Clement meets Thunderball.” People are living on a planet with incredible gravity such that steel is almost like kleenex to them. However, they have enemies and need atomic weapons to deal with them so, when an atomic-powered spaceship goes down in the ocean, the protagonist and some of those enemies converge on the wreckage and tense combat ensues. This thrilling tale is simultaneously action- and idea-packed and I enjoyed it a lot. Considering each of the “science” and the “fiction,” “The Test Stand” is superior in the latter while this is superior in the former but both are highly recommended.

Links: 2019-10-07

Science Fiction

• On Tiptree and naming | Julie Phillips. An island of reason in an ocean of unreason.
• I Scored! | Adventures Fantastic. Reminds me I never posted the results of my latest trip to the library book sale.
• Halting Publication of Compelling Science Fiction. Simbulizm. Timing. This was the only zine I was likely to miss.
• Street cred – Brad R. Torgersen. “…the fourth annual Dragon Awards. Which are part of the 80,000-attendee DragonCon multi-genre, multi-media geek convention.” Gosh, you could combine the last 17 Worldcons and they’d still fit in that.
• Blog #41. Jack McDevitt presents some mostly very good writing advice. (Partial exception: I actually do want to know how the star drive works if you tell it right, but I agree that outright “infodumps” are generally bad.)

Science

• Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction: Windows Black Screen Nightmare. This particular item is tech rather than science. It illustrates one of the many reasons I go to great lengths to run Slackware. (Speaking of science and tech, I still love Bruce Sterling’s bit in one of his novels: ‘Computer science was a fraud. It always had been. It was the only branch of science ever named after a gadget… Now physics, that was true science. Nobody ever called physics “lever science” or “billiard ball science.”‘ Now I have a hard time thinking of physics without “lever science” popping into my head.)

Other

History

• The History Blog » Intact grave of Minoan woman found on Crete.

Politics

Liberals who value free thinking and the constitution might wonder, with friends like “the trans left” and many of the Democratic nominees, who needs enemies?

• I’m a Feminist Who Was Purged by the Trans Left | The American Conservative.
• There’s Only 1 Democrat Talking About the Constitution, and It’s (Shudder) Joe Biden – Reason.com.

Liberals who value democracy, reason, and integrity might wonder, with enemies like the following right-wing writers, who needs friends?

• Why Identity Politics Kills Democracy | The American Conservative.
• The Sense and Sensibility of George Will | RealClearPolitics. (Incidentally, Will has endorsed Michael Bennet, who is possibly the only modern American politician capable of quoting Thucydides.)
• A Necessary Remedy for Brazen Corruption | The American Conservative.

Humor

• Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Calvin’s usually a ball of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs energy but he has his zen, too.

Music

• Robert Hunter, Grateful Dead’s poetic lyricist, dead at 78.
• Ginger Baker, Cream’s volatile drummer, dies at 80.

For a second consecutive post, we’ve lost two more. I’ll get to them next time, maybe, but I already had the music loaded up (overloaded), including one that “should have been aborted” and others that might be even worse in Baker’s book: