FFB: Double Your Pleasure: The Ace SF Double -- James A. Corrick

I've been a fan of the Ace Doubles ever since I saw one for the first time.  In those days the cover price was 35 cents, and you got two novels back-to-back.  How could you go wrong?  You couldn't.  Well, I couldn't.  I know that there are those who hold some of the books in this series in disdain, but I'm not one of them.  I enjoyed every one I read back in the old days, and I'd probably enjoy them again if I read them now.  Over the years I picked them up when I saw them, and when the Internet made just about everything available with the click of a mouse, I decided I wanted all of the D-series, if not all the Doubles, and that explains why there are check marks by a lot of the titles in this little (86 pp) book.  


Not that the list of all the titles in the series is all you get.  There's a short buy very good introduction by Donald A. Wollheim, the series editor, which is followed by James A. Corrick's 8-page history. Even if you know most of it already, it's always fun to read about it again.  I was looking through the book the other day, and I ran across a couple of the later titles that I decided I need to order.  That's the danger of a book like this.  And the fun of it, too.

FFB: Amazing Stories, June, 1958

Growing up in the 1950s, I loved the SF digest magazines.  As I'm sure I've said before, I liked them all, even those that others looked down on, like Imagination, Imaginative Tales, Fantastic, and Amazing Stories.  Sure, I read and liked Galaxy, F&SF, and Astounding, and I enjoyed them.  F&SF was probably my favorite of them all.  But I still loved the others, including Amazing.  I'm not alone here.  Ed Gorman was another fan, and so was Roger Ebert.  If you look through the letter columns of the back issues of the magazines I mentioned above, you can read some of the letters they wrote to them.  Anyway, when I was feeling nostalgic the other day, I pulled down this magazine from the shelves and settled down to read a few stories.  

Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered that one of the stories was a Johnny Mayhem adventure!   This one was published as by C. H. Thames, but the author was really Milton Lesser, better known as Stephen Marlowe.  I really loved the Mayhem stories when I was a kid, and for just a second or two I was transported back to 1958 when stories like this could be printed and read without irony.  I've written about Johnny Mayhem before, so let me just quote what I said then. He began life as Johnny Marlow, "a pariah, a criminal, . . . who had been mortally wounded on a wild planet deep within the Saggitarian Swarm, whose life had been saved, after a fashion, by the white magic of that planet. Mayhem, doomed now to possible immortality as a bodiless sentience, an elan, which could occupy and activate a corpse if it had been frozen properly." Being an elan has reformed Marlow/Mayhem, "who had dedicated his life to the service of the Galactic League because a normal life and normal social relationships were not possible for him." See, that's because an elan can't "remain in one body for more than a month without body and elan perishing." Since you never know when you'll need a guy (or an elan) like Johnny Mayhem, "Every world which had an Earthman population and a Galactic League post, however small, had a body waiting in cold storage, waiting for Johnny Mayhem if his services were required." How could any teenager living in a little East Texas town resist a story with a hook like that?

The title of the story in this issue of Amazing is "Mayhem Enslaved," and Mayhem's elan is put into a body that's sent to kidnap a man from a planet where humans are enslaved by creatures that look like lobsters.  With the help of some incredible coincidences and any number of instances when things go exactly right for him, Mayhem grabs the guy, aids the overthrow of the lobster creatures, and completes his mission.  It's hard to believe that anybody could cram so much plot into so few pages, and it's all highly unlikely and even unbelievable, though in 1958 I believed it all.  And there's a part of me that still does.

Robert Bloch's "Red Moon Rising" is clearly a reaction to the big event of 1957: Sputnik.  In Bloch's story a gigantic satellite (estimated weight: 50 tons) appears in the sky, and American panics.  I figured out where this one was going in the first couple of pages, or maybe I just remembered it.  Who can say?  It was still fun.

"Daddy Fix" by Al Sevcik is SF only because it's set in the future.  It could've been set in any era.  The editor says "you'll remember it for a long, long time."  I don't know if I remembered it or not, but I knew exactly what the shocker ending was, so maybe I did remember it.  Just for fun, I looked up Sevcik on the Internet.  Apparently he lives in League City, Texas, only a few miles from Alvin.  Maybe I'll give him a call.

The other big Sputnik-related item in the magazine is noted on the cover: "Science Courses open in 50 Uncrowded Colleges."  Sadly, this is a misleading title, as the actual article shows that many of the colleges listed can't accept any more students into most of their science programs.  There's a related item, too.  It's "Class of 2008: A Prediction of Things to Come in the Educational Pattern."  It's hilariously off the mark.

I haven't read the other stuff in the magazine yet, but what I did read was great fun.  Not for everyone, I'm sure, but highly enjoyable for me.

FFB: 5th Annual Edition The Year's Best S-F -- Judith Merril, Editor

At some point Judith Merril's anthologies originated in hardback, but they were reprinted by Dell, where the series started.  This one is typical in that Merril didn't confine herself to looking for stories in the usual suspects and in fact didn't confine herself to fiction.  A John W. Campbell editorial and a newspaper article are included.

I read a lot of these stories when they were first published, and it's surprising how much of them I remembered when I started rereading them.  Some of them seem just as fresh now as they did 50-something years ago, though of course some are quite dated.  I'm pretty sure Jack Finney couldn't get away with "The Other Wife" now, though in 1960 it was published in The Saturday Evening Post, which in those days must have sold well into the millions of copies.  Time changes everything. 

"Make a Prison" is, I believe, Lawrence Block's only SF story.  It's short and clever, but it has a point to make.  So do a lot of these stories, and I suspect many of you are familiar with them.  "Flowers for Algernon," for example, and "The Man Who Lost the Sea."  I'm a Clifford D. Simak fan, so of course I liked "A Death in the House," which is a bit different from some of his work, but still the same in others.  And Leiber's "Mariana" is another good one.  Well, they're all good.  

And then there are Merril's introductions to the stories, which are distinguished by the strength of her animus for Kingsley Amis, whose New Maps of Hell had recently been published.  She makes many catty remarks about him as she goes along.  

Copies of the book are available cheap from the usual Internet sources if you want to read some of the good old stuff.

CONTENTS: “Introduction” by Judith Merril; 
“The Handler” by Damon Knight (1960); 
“The Other Wife” by Jack Finney (1960); 
“No Fire Burns” by Avram Davidson (1959); 
“No, No, Not Rogov!” by Cordwainer Smith (1958); 
“Shoreline at Sunset” by Ray Bradbury (1959); “The Dreamsman” by Gordon R. Dickson (1959);
“Multum in Parvo” by Jack Sharkey (1959); 
“Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes (1959); 
“’What Do You Mean...Human?’” by John W. Campbell, Jr. (1959); 
“Sierra Sam” by Ralph Dighton (1960); 
“A Death in the House” by Clifford D. Simak (1959); 
“Mariana” by Fritz Leiber (1960); 
“An Inquiry Concerning the Curvature of the Earth’s Surface” by Roger Price (1958); 
“Day at the Beach” by Carol Emshwiller (1959); 
“Hot Argument” by Randall Garrett (1959); 
“What the Left Hand Was Doing” by Darrel T. Langart (1960); 
“The Sound-Sweep” by J. G. Ballard (1960); 
“Plenitude” by Will Worthington (1959); 
“The Man Who Lost the Sea” by Theodore Sturgeon (1959); 
“Make a Prison” by Lawrence Block (1958); 
“What Now, Little Man?” by Mark Clifton (1959); 
“Me” by Hilbert Schenck, Jr. (1959); 
“The Year’s S-F: A Summary and Honorable Mentions” by Judith Merril. 

The Artist Who Helped Invent Space Travel

The Artist Who Helped Invent Space Travel

Hat tip to Jeff Segal.

Forgotten Books: Sci-Fi Private Eye Charles G. Waugh & Martin H. Greenberg, Editors

Let's get the title out of the way first. I'd be willing to bet a week's pay (not that I get paid these days, what with being a pensioner and all) that the editors had little or nothing to do with it. The "sci-fi" part doesn't bother me. I know it offends many, but not me. What bothers me is that I stupidly judged a book by its cover and assumed that this would be an anthology of SF stories that featured private-eyes. Wouldn't you? I mean, besides the title there's the guy in the futuristic trenchcoat and fedora. What's between the covers, however, is another kettle of goulash.

The first story if Isaac Asimov's "The Singing Bells" in which valuable moon artefacts are stolen. The baffled cops seek out the Great Detective who can solve the case without leaving his home. The next two stories, Poul Anderson's "The Martian Crown Jewels" and Philip Jose Farmer's "A Scarletin Study" are Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In Anderson's story, the Holmesian detective is a Martian creature who looks more like a bird than like Basil Rathbone. In Farmer's tale, the detective is a talking dog.

Then comes Donald Westlake's "The Winner," which is a prison break story. No detectives in sight.

Finally, with Tom Reamy's "The Detweiler Boy," we get what the picture and title promised, minus the fedora and trenchcoat. Reamy's tale is even set in Los Angeles, though his first-person narrator finds a killer who's nothing like anyone Philip Marlowe ever tracked down.

In "Time Exposures" by Wilson Tucker we have cops. No private-eyes to be seen. I got a kick out of this one because while the main character has a camera that can photograph the past, he has to use a slide rule to figure out the settings.

Robert Silverberg gives us a continent-spanning city in "Getting Across," and while a private citizen is asked to find a missing woman, it's a real stretch to call this one a private-eye story.

And there's just no way at all to call Philip K. Dick's "War Games" even a cop story. No cops, no private-eyes, just people who evaluate toys.

The last story is one of Larry Niven's Gil Hamilton stories. The same two editors chose to close out Supernatural Sleuths with a Gil Hamilton story, as well (my review of that book is here). As I mention in that review, Hamilton's not really a p. i. He works for a branch of the U. N. called A.R.M., and he hunts organleggers. But he's close enough to a p. i. to qualify, especially in this company.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the stories aren't good ones. In fact, I liked them all. Niven's is the best of the lot, for me, but they all have something to recommend them. If you're looking for cross-genre crime stories, this book is the place to find some entertaining ones.

The War with the Gizmos -- Murray Leinster

Murray Leinster was at one time known as "The Dean of Science Fiction," having started writing the stuff before there was any such thing and having continued to write it well past the middle of the 20th century. He wrote a little of everything, including what I'd call horror SF, like this novel that capitalizes on the '50s monster craze. It's a wonder that American-International didn't latch onto this book for a quick B&W cheapie with Ray Milland. It has everything: a small cast, a threat to all life on earth, and invisible monsters, which would have been a huge plus. You can't have a cheaper monster for film than an invisible one.

No doubt current readers would find the book hopelessly dated both in style and content. Leinster begins with eight or so pages of no dialogue, and when the dialogue comes, it's nearly always tagged (at least twice in the book, someone utters something zesfully). Leinster even uses passive voice. He does plenty of telling rather than showing. Some of the phrasing, maybe more than some, is pretty old-fashioned.

None of that bothers me at all, of course. I have no trouble reading books from another era and accepting their various styles. I can read Dickens with pleasure, and Shakespeare too, not that I'm claiming Leinster's in their league. (I sometimes think that when we complain something is "dated" the comment says more about us than about the material.)

As for the plot, well, it's about these sentient gases that started killing animals and are now killing humans. It's quite likely that these are the creatures that our ancestors thought of as demons, and for some reason they've suddenly started to reproduce at an incredible rapid rate. They're discovered by an oddly assorted group, and naturally no one believes them, not even when the deaths begin to multiply alarmingly. It's all fairly ridiculous, but Leinster manages to make it almost believable. I'm sure I must have read this when it first appeared back in 1958, but I didn't remember. It was fun and fast, and I'm glad I read it again. After all, how many books do you read in which smoking can save your life?