The Short Story Thread

[Extollager]

The story was "Venus Mission" from the July 1951 issue of PLANET STORIES.

Reprinted in an old Ace book, a collection edited by Wollheim called The Hidden Planet, a nicely affordable copy of which I have just ordered. Thanks...

 

[dask]

Hope you like it. Not everyone has the same tastes but I thought the story was one of the most exciting, nail-biting tales I've read in a looong time.

 

[Extollager]

I liked "Hallucination Orbit" enough to be interested in more by this author, about whom I know virtually nothing yet.

 

[J-Sun]

Read a really weird 127 page anthology published by Popular Library - if you look at the spine, it says "Dr. Cyclops - Henry Kuttner" as thought it were a novel or collection. On the front and back covers, title page, and copyright page, it says "Dr. Cyclops by Henry Kuttner Including Too Late for Eternity by Bryce Walton and The Harpers of Titan by Edmond Hamilton" or similar, admitting it's an anthology but without any editor confessing to responsibility. And there's no copyright date except a note that the copyright on the Kuttner has been renewed by Popular Library in 1967. And the actual order of the stories is Kuttner/Hamilton/Walton. And the cover art illustrates nothing in any of the stories.

So we've got incompetent packaging. But what of the stories?

I bought it mostly for the Kuttner but also to read a Captain Future tale by Hamilton as I don't think I ever have before, though with no expectations about it. Imagine my surprise when the Kuttner is easily the worst of the three. It's still well-plotted and fairly exciting - a good light read - but this 1940 tale of a German mad scientist shrinking our protagonists as part of his experiments and trying to kill them all is really a silly example of a couple of often silly subgenres. But the surprises kept on surprising as I really enjoyed "The Harpers of Titan" (1950). After writing a gazillion Captain Future novels in the 40s, Hamilton tacked on a few stories and this is one of them. It has quite a bit of Flash Gordony fun with the robot and the android and the brain-in-a-box who comprise the Futuremen around Curt Newton, aka CAP-TAIN FUUUTURE! but the tale is really vivid in its description of the eponymous critters and involves a remarkably thoughtful take on being a brain in a box as well as in a body. I dunno - I liked it. And then I didn't know Bryce Walton from Adam and figured "Too Late for Eternity" (1955) must be lame filler but, while stark raving mad, it turned out to be thoroughly competent and effective. It's about how women live longer than men. Do they ever. The longevity difference started innocently enough but the gap continued to widen

And then the Third World War. Records, statistics destroyed. A lot of men destroyed too. And after that, three women for every man.

Matriarchy. The women had taken over. And a lot of those women hated men and hated science. Some of them formed anti-male cults. Who needs men?

They took over everything, Joad thought, lying there with his face pressed against the floor. Everything.

Joad is about 120 and comes home to find the young up-and-coming business exec he'd recommended to his wife in bed with her, as is natural when it's time for the old guys to be retired and the ever-youthful wife needs someone with more, um, stamina. Hilariously, in this matriarchy where women control everything, the morning after her wild night with her new guy, she makes both men breakfast. There are similar persistent 50s notes through this 2700ish matriarchy and the Freudian weirdness and misogyny is kind of staggering, though it is counterbalanced by an eventual misandry - let's just call it a general misanthropy. But a couple of aspects of the story really work. First, it's a completely whacked out future that has a compelling nature - like Pohl and Kornbluth on a bad day. Bad acid day. And the protagonist's pain and anger at getting old and being replaced and finally getting wise to how he's been programmed to accept everything - and how he doesn't accept it - is quite effectively portrayed. It's kind of the madman or Ancient Mariner effect of a guy grabbing you by the lapels and conveying a tale of lunacy with such intense conviction that it works. And he hits a lot of birds with this stone - age, sex (kinda shocking sex for '55, I'd think), gender, cults of beauty, pointlessness of some societal ambitions, the bad aspects of exaggerated masculine and feminine traits, etc. Wild stuff.

Anyway - so I totally got my fifty cents worth from this.

 

[dask]

Read it a year or two ago. Don't remember much about it other than I liked it.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Wow. That looks like a really odd anthology. One might note that "Dr. Cyclops" is an adaptation of the movie of the same name, which explains its less than sophisticated plot. (But the movie is visually interesting for 1940, with some nifty Technicolor special effects.)

 

[J-Sun]

Read it a year or two ago. Don't remember much about it other than I liked it.

Yep, that's the one - I think literally. ISFDB says it was only printed once. And after mag publication and aside from this one-time volume, the Kuttner only appears in two other minor sources, the Hamilton in one, and the Walton in none. So this is pretty singular obscure stuff.

Wow. That looks like a really odd anthology. One might note that "Dr. Cyclops" is an adaptation of the movie of the same name, which explains its less than sophisticated plot. (But the movie is visually interesting for 1940, with some nifty Technicolor special effects.)

Now that you mention it, I guess you're right. I was thinking it was a Kuttner story turned into a movie (because there's also a novelization of it by "Wil Garth") but I guess it's more like a movie that had a novelette-ization and a novelization. Both the movie and Kuttner's story came out in 1940. You can bang together a movie pretty quick and mags do have a lot of lead time, but the whole production of a movie release usually takes longer so, if they came out around the same time, the movie must be the original.

So, yeah, that lets Kuttner off the hook a bit. If he had to be faithful to the movie storyline, then that is what it is and, as I say, he wrote it in an exciting enough manner, at least. Thanks for making me rethink that.

 

[Bick]

Reading around in 1970's Analog magazines, I read the 1978 short story, I put my Blue Genes On, by Orson Scott Card. Excellent story about a human expeditionary force coming back to a disease-ravaged Earth 800 years after humanity was forced to flee. The story can also be found in the OSC collections Unaccompanied Sonata, and Maps in a Mirror.

 

[Jesse412]

Wow. That looks like a really odd anthology. One might note that "Dr. Cyclops" is an adaptation of the movie of the same name, which explains its less than sophisticated plot. (But the movie is visually interesting for 1940, with some nifty Technicolor special effects.)

I actually own a copy of the original short story in a collection called They Came From Outer Space: 12 Classic Science Fiction Tales That Became Major Motion Pictures that the film was originally based on. Apparently the film became so popular that Kuttner was asked to expand it into a full-length novel. I watched the movie a couple years ago on Svengoolie and thought it was quite fun.

 

[J-Sun]

Apparently the film became so popular that Kuttner was asked to expand it into a full-length novel.

He may have been asked but, while Kuttner wrote the story, as indicated above, the novel "was published under the house name Will Garth, and was probably the work of Alexander Samalman" (sfe).

That is interesting, though - if the Ackerman anthology (it was Ackerman, right?) is supposed to be stories-into-movies, then he's saying Kuttner's novelette came first and the movie was based on it like I was originally thinking. Hm. Thorny knotted weirdness.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Starting a series of reviews from this anthology (1985):

Several of the pieces are quite familiar to me. I will indicate which ones I did not reread for these reviews with an asterisk in front of the title.

The book is divided into thematic sections, of which the first is "Fiends and Creatures."

*"Dracula's Guest" by Bram Stoker (written 1897; published 1914) -- The story goes that this was intended to be the first chapter of Dracula, but was removed for some reason, perhaps because it would have introduced its terrors too early in the book. In any case, this tale relates how the narrator (probably Jonathan Harker) encounters supernatural horrors while traveling (on Walpurgis Night, no less) toward Dracula's home. A nice bit of classic Gothic.

 

[Jesse412]

That looks like a fantastic collection.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

"The Professor's Teddy Bear" by Theodore Sturgeon (Weird Tales, March 1948) -- A very strange story about a little boy and his sinister toy bear, and how that influences his future adult self. Surreal and creepy.

"Bubnoff and the Devil" by Ivan Turgenev (19th century; translated from Russian) -- Absurdist tale of a soldier meeting the Devil, the Devil's grandmother, and the Devil's granddaughter (named Bibbidibobbidibu, to give you some idea of the wackiness.) Pretty much a dadaist shaggy dog story.

"The Quest for Blank Claveringi" by Patricia Highsmith (The Saturday Evening Post, June 17, 1967) -- The famous author of suspense novels spins a yarn about giant snails. Since that theme is announced in the very first sentence, there are no real surprises about the fate of the protagonist, but it's vividly written.

"The Erl-King" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1782; translated from German) -- Folktale-like poem dealing with a father and son riding through the woods, and the child's fear of being snatched away by the Erl-King. Famously set to music by Franz Schubert.

 

[Randy M.]

"The Professor's Teddy Bear" by Theodore Sturgeon (Weird Tales, March 1948) -- A very strange story about a little boy and his sinister toy bear, and how that influences his future adult self. Surreal and creepy.

Years ago I came across a description of the writings of Edgar Pangborn and Zenna Henderson as similar to one facet of Sturgeon's work. This is one of the other facets. When he wanted to write dark he was excellent at it: "It," "Killdozer," "Microscopic God," "Bianca's Hands" and at least as many others. There's a solid, effective collection of dark sf/fantasy/horror to be created from his body of work.

"Bubnoff and the Devil" by Ivan Turgenev (19th century; translated from Russian) -- Absurdist tale of a soldier meeting the Devil, the Devil's grandmother, and the Devil's granddaughter (named Bibbidibobbidibu, to give you some idea of the wackiness.) Pretty much a dadaist shaggy dog story.

Kaye must like this one. Looking at ISFDB I realized I read this back in the 1970s in another of his collections, Fiends and Creatures. Can't recall anything about it.

"The Quest for Blank Claveringi" by Patricia Highsmith (The Saturday Evening Post, June 17, 1967) -- The famous author of suspense novels spins a yarn about giant snails. Since that theme is announced in the very first sentence, there are no real surprises about the fate of the protagonist, but it's vividly written.

She had a thing for snails; see also, "The Snail Watcher." I do like the short stories I've read by her. I should read more ...

"The Erl-King" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1782; translated from German) -- Folktale-like poem dealing with a father and son riding through the woods, and the child's fear of being snatched away by the Erl-King. Famously set to music by Franz Schubert.

... and I really should dig this anthology out and read it all.


Randy M.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Thanks for the comments. Onward.

"The Bottle Imp" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1891) -- The title creature grants what the owner of the bottle desires; but if the owner still has it at the time of death, the fate is eternal damnation. The only way to get rid of the thing is to sell it at a lower price than one paid for it. Of course, that gets tricky once the price becomes extremely low. The author adds a great deal of local color to his tale by making the main characters Hawaiian.

"A Malady of Magicks" by Craig Shaw Gardner (Fantastic, October 1978) -- This is one of those fantasy comedies that are not my cup of tea. It's a spoof of the typical wizard story, with a plot which is fairly random.

"Lan Lung" by M. Lucie Chin (published in a different version as "Dragon . . . Ghost" in Ares, March 1980) -- Interesting fantasy with a touch of science fiction. The narrator is a 21st century Chinese-American tourist who finds himself a "ghost" (of sorts) in ancient China after he falls off the Great Wall to his (apparent) death. He becomes the companion of a Taoist monk and has an encounter with an unusual dragon. Imaginative.

"The Dragon Over Hackensack" by Richard L. Wexelblat (original to this volume, as far as I can tell) -- Brief free verse poem about a dragon in modern times. Ironic in tone.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

"The Transformation" by Mary Shelley (1830) -- A dissolute young man exchanges his young, strong, and handsome body for the grotesque body of a dwarfish magician for three days, the payment being the magician's chest of riches, in order to win the hand of his beloved, whom he lost due to his arrogant refusal to accept the conditions of forgiveness offered by her father. A very romantic tale, in the old sense.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

"The Faceless Thing" by Edward D. Hoch (Magazine of Horror, November 1963) -- An old man goes back to the farm where he grew up to seek out the monster that killed his sister fifty years ago. The encounter is not what you might expect. A brief, effective story.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The next section of the book is called "Lovers and Other Monsters":

"The Anchor" by Jack Snow (apparently original to the author's collection Dark Music and Other Spectral Tales, 1947) -- Set in some kind of fantasy world (the protagonist's name is Ailil, for example), this brief story tells how a man in a boat in a lake one night encounters a supernaturally beautiful woman, and the eerie discovery he makes the next morning. Written in a lush, sensual, feverish style, which would not work in a longer piece.

"When the Clock Strikes" by Tanith Lee (Weird Tales #1, 1980 -- the paperback anthology that followed the famous magazine) -- One of several sinister variations on fairy tales written by this author. This one is a dark version of "Cinderella," in which it is obvious from the start that the title character is a witch intent on revenge. Written with Lee's usual elegant, vivid, rather decadent style.

"Oshidori" by Lafcadio Hearn (1904) -- Very short tale of a hunter who kills one of a pair of ducks and who is visited by the spirit of the other duck. The author wrote many such stories based on the folklore of his adopted land of Japan, some of which were adapted into the famous Japanese horror anthology film Kwaidan. A mythic combination of beauty, sadness, and horror.

*"Carmilla" by Sheridan LeFanu (1872) -- A famous and influential vampire novella. This seems to be the source of the very common theme (particularly in movies, many of them based more or less loosely on this story) of the lesbian vampire. There is no explicit sexual content, of course, but it is made absolutely clear that the female vampire is passionately in love with her intended female victim.

 

[BAYLOR]

Adrift on the Haunted Seas (The Best Short Stories of William Hope Hodgson) Great stuff including his classic story The Voice in the Night which was the basis for the 1963 Japanese film Mantango.


The Nightmare ( And Other Tales of Dark Fantasy) contains such gems as The Nightmare and The Labyrinth . superb stuff.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

"Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory" by Orson Scott Card (Chrysalis 4, 1979) -- Any story which begins with the discovery of a horribly deformed infant in a toilet is going to be a shocker. Things get more and more gruesome as the protagonist realizes that the creature is a result of the wicked things he's done in his life that he won't admit to himself. Pretty powerful stuff, almost if Card was writing with Harlan Ellison looking over his shoulder. (I'm particularly thinking of Ellison's "Croatoan.")

"Lenore" by Gottfried August Burger (1774; translated from German by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1844) -- Long narrative poem about a woman who despairs for her lover, assumed dead in a war, who seems to come back for her. A bleak ending, but a little too sing-song for my tastes.

"The Black Wedding" by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1958; translated from Yiddish by Martha Glicklich) -- The daughter of a rabbi who is said to have practiced ritual magic is married off to an older widower with five children when her father dies; but she can tell that he is really a demon, as is everyone else involved in her married life, including her unborn child. This can be read as supernatural horror or as the delusions of a madwoman.

*"Hop-Frog" by Edgar Allan Poe (1849) -- A deformed dwarf of a jester gets revenge on his cruel master. A gruesome little chiller.

*"Sardonicus" by Ray Russell (Playboy, January 1961) -- Excellent neo-Gothic tale about a fellow whose face is distorted into a grotesque smile. Later made into a pretty good movie, Mr. Sardonicus, the same year. Highly recommended.

"Graveyard Shift" by Richard Matheson (published as "The Faces" in Ed McBain's Mystery Book #1, 1960) -- The publication history of this story is interesting. It first appeared as "The Faces" in the magazine (not "book") I have listed above. A little research reveals that this short-lived magazine (only three issues) had a department called "Graveyard Shift," which apparently ran stories which were more horror than mystery. When the story was reprinted, somebody gave it the name of the department rather than its real title. That explains why the title has nothing at all to do with the story. To add to the confusion, it has sometimes been reprinted under the title "Day of Reckoning." In any case, this is a short, genuinely chilling psychological shocker which starts with the discovery of a woman with her throat cut and gets deeper into madness from that.

"Wake Not the Dead" (1823; credited here, and in other appearances, to Johann Ludwig Tieck. However, a little research reveals that it was actually written by Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach. Translated from German) -- Extremely overwrought, overwritten (and/or overtranslated) story of a fellow who foolishly asks a sorcerer to return his dead wife to him. She comes back as a vampire. Besides the overblown prose, notable mostly for the fact that the dead woman only needs blood to become passionate enough to make love with her husband (without it, she is "alive" but in an emotionless state) and for a really odd ending.

"Night and Silence" by Maurice Level (Pan, January 1922) -- Weird little story about two elderly brothers, one blind and one deaf, and what happens to them as they sit vigil over their dead sister. Might be best described as horrifying, unfunny slapstick.