New Writings in SF5 edited by John Carnell (Part Two)

“Acclimatization” by David Stringer

I hated this story, I was unengaged with the main character, a spacer Gerry Kaufman, who returns to earth from his first trip to Deepspace then whines about it. I also found the future history setting and plot uninteresting. So I will stop here, one thing I said when I started this blog was if I have nothing nice to say…, sometimes I am unsuccessful. But I try.

If you want to read some stories about rather odd conquests of space I suggest Larry Niven’s stories of Beowulf Shaeffer, “Neutron Star” is a great place to start or the many really enjoyable stories of Cordwainer Smith, I don’t have his books at the cabin but start with “Scanners Live in Vain” and “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul”. Or better yet find them all by reading everything he wrote. Moving on. 

“The Expanding Man” by R.W. Mackelworth

from Carnell’s introduction, “ Not all science fiction stories require a complex plot or setting to make them acceptable. The following story, set in a park, is solely a conversational piece, but its implications prove far-reaching.” 

The conversation is between Algie Ryan and a stranger he has met in the park. They are seated on a bench while Ryan recounts a somewhat incoherent story concerning his wife. While the stranger ( he provides the name Smith) pretends to lend a sympathetic ear, this is not what he is interested in. It seems that Ryan had spoken to another stranger, who subsequently vanished. Smith wants to know what Ryan told him. As he says “you are the kind of man who confesses, Mr Ryan. All confessions fun along the same line-a protest, a windy grumble with tensions running out in an acid stream.” (107)

Spoilers ahead

I am going to quote a bit more because this is a really well-written story. The description of the park, the back and forth between Ryan and Smith are beautifully realized. 

Finally, Ryan describes his encounter, “ I sensed he wasn’t ordinary, that he was from out of this world, and I accepted it. Then, as I told my troubles he seemed to grow until he filled the whole of my view.” (108) As Smith is able to demonstrate Ryan means this literally. Because Smith and the previous stranger are aliens from two different factions and in contacting Ryan a rule have been broken. Ryan goes on “ “he took them on he grew larger with them…until he was enormous, a great skinful of my problems, of small household nags and big bank tyrannies. I thought he would explode.” “It is trick, a conjuring trick for ignorant natives! He broke every political agreement and every solemn pact of non-interference that’s ever been made in this sector of space-time merely by speaking to you.” Smith spoke like a small-town politician who hadn’t time to fix the ballot boxes and knew he had lost to the other candidate. The other side was breeding a nimbler race of mice.” (109)

From this description, it may seem like a fairly ordinary story of two extraterrestrial visitors vying for mankind’s support, but Mackelworth’s story is far more complex than that, and Ryan is very much an unreliable narrator. This story has, to me, more of a New Wave vibe than the other fairly conventionally plotted stories in this collection. But I absolutely loved it, well written, nicely plotted with great dialogue Mackelworth is another writer I will look for in the future. This collection seems to be it’s the only appearance of this story.

“Treasure Hunt” by Joseph Green

Professor Soames Chalcedony was a Philosophy Professor and spokesperson for a group advocating that longevity treatments be extended to everyone, at present, they are restricted to the rich and the influential. At 80 years of age, while still in good health, Chalcedony has opted to have his body submerged into the Mediterranean in a coffin. Here Chalcedony will live through a thousand years of dreams for each day his body takes to die. But his body has now been stolen for use in a treasure hunt. He is told “You are a mental pattern, a matrix of electrical fires taken from one mind and forcibly imposed on another. “ (118) in a few hours the original mind will reassert itself and Chalcedony’s mind will fade. They go on. “We are on a treasure hunt. We are after the fresh-laid egg of the firebird, The most beautiful object in the galaxy, and this is the only way one may be obtained. You were chosen to share this effort with us because our computer selected you as the philosopher most likely to succeed. It seems Chalcedony has been retrieved by four adventurers who found alien mind transfer equipment on a remote dead planet and decided to retrieve an egg to pay for longevity treatments. One has already died and a second has been brain damaged. The other two men have tried but failed to retrieve the egg. 

To retrieve the egg one must assume the form of chariot-horse.

Chalcedony sees his new body as a reflection in a pool of liquid mercury “seeing the plump, rounded armless body, heavy tapered tail, snake-length of neck topped by a blunt and broad-nosed dragon’s head, the open mouth showing pointed tongue and diamond glitter of teeth in the wide wicked jaws. He looked at the two wheels of bone that supplied his locomotion as he moved away, at the massive bones which protruded from both sides of the muscular abdomen” (117) 

He is on a planet where life is based on silicon, a world of crystal growths. “When he moved he gave off light, and he now realized this was true on every plant and animal on this sphere. His borrowed eyes knew and allowed for this. He was a humble vegetarian, with teeth of diamond and stomach of hydrofluoric acid, there were growths of prisms, seed carriers of crystal bells, fruits of gemmed translucency that were his food.” (122) If he succeeds Chalcedony will be rewarded with longevity treatments and a place on the crew if he wants it. But first, he must navigate a very strange landscape. 

The story is not long but Green has offered a really beautifully depth of description for the silicon-based forest. Honestly, this is what I originally signed up for when I began reading science fiction. Utterly alien, aliens and strange planets based on totally different physical laws and an adventure to boot. All that it needs is a great cover by Frank R. Paul dripping with crystal forests, prism mountains and battling dragons with wheels. Again it looks like this collection was its only appearance.  

“Sunout” by Eric C. Williams

With this title, and the description of the death of the sun in the review, (the story is falsely attributed to Mackelworth in the review), I am not too worried about spoilers, this is an okay story dealing with the discovery that the sun is about to go out, by the staff of an observatory. The plot revolves around what to do with the information some opt to publicize it right away and some including the head of the observatory wants to tell the president and other heads of state so they can prepare of the resulting panic. I said in discussing the first story in that collection that otherwise so so stories can be redeemed by the ending. “The Secretary went down a step and greeted the President with an urgency showing his held-down panic. “This is Professor Weiner,” he said, turning.

The President extended his hand.

The Sun went out.” (162) 

Great stuff. I did not know what to expect from a collection put together by John Carnell but as I said in Part One once I had read a few I knew that I was in good hands. The overall quality and the sheer variety of plots really made for a great reading experience. I have a few more of this New Writings in SF collections and I will keep an eye open for more, as well as looking for other stories by some of the writers I discussed here. 

Sentinels of Space by Eric Frank Russell

  Eric Frank Russell is possibly, the science fiction author most indebted to the theories of Charles Fort for his plots. Indeed Ford’s statement, “ I think we are property", is used in Sinister Barrier, the Russell work that claimed the cover for the initial issue of John W. Campbell's pulp magazine Unknown. Certainly elements of Fort’s theories are also evident in Russell’s 1951 novel Sentinels of Space  (originally published as The Star Watchers in the Nov. 1951 issue of Startling Stories).  Space pilot Captain David Raven has been summoned before The World Council. It is obvious immediately that the Council is uncomfortable in Raven's presence and they avoid eye contact. They talk to him only long enough to tell him they have just discovered that Earth’s colonies on Mars and Venus have been responsible for a number of sabotage attacks on Earth industries and research institutions. The colonies are hoping to gain their independence. Earth does not wish to acknowledge the attacks, they feel a united solar system is needed in case they encounter aliens as they launch space expeditions further afield. Carson, the director of Earth’s Terran Security Bureau, has sifted all Earth's birth records to locate Raven, an exceptionally powerful telepath. Carson wants Raven to act as a secret agent tasked with thwarting the colonies. He meets with Raven and explains the problem in more detail. As citizens of Earth the colonists can move about Earth freely, using mutant agents to conduct the attacks. It seems that as the colonists traveled to Mars and Venus they were exposed to radiation in space. The radiation produced mutations with special powers. At present the mutants seem to be limited, each has only one power, for example telepathy, levitation, etc., there are 12 varieties in total. Raven will be sent out alone acting on his own initiative with no official status and reporting only to Carson to stop the undeclared war.

The attacks on Raven start the minute he leaves Carson’s office. Despite this, he returns home to his female companion Leina. It is obvious right away that this is not a conventional male female relationship, but then it is obvious that Raven is not simply a powerful telepath. Once he explains his role to Leina she reminds him that, “It is the unwritten law that we must never be tempted to interfere except with the prime motive of thwarting the Denebs. We might give ourselves away just sufficiently to frighten humankind…,” (19) Yes it seems that Raven and Leina are very powerful extraterrestrial observers stationed on Earth to alert their unnamed organization should an alien race called the Denebs detect the civilizations in our solar system. There are a pair of observers one male, one female on each inhabited planet. Despite the non interference directive, Raven, and Charles, the male observer, on Venus do interfere. They do this despite the objections of Leina and Charles' partner Mavis. 

And so you have a fairly pedestrian SF secret agent war with the colonies drama. It is interesting that Russell uses the theme of a lone agent taking on an entire planet several times. tor.com posted several discussions of Russell’s novel Wasp the most recent can be found here.

https://www.tor.com/2017/06/06/are-we-reading-about-a-hero-or-terrorist-wasp-by-eric-frank-russell/

An earlier one appears here.

https://www.tor.com/2011/03/03/one-man-against-a-whole-planet-eric-frank-russells-wasp/

I think Wasp was a better novel although overall I probably enjoyed Sentinels of Space more because of several elements I will discuss below. However there were also elements I hated. Some of the dialogue is nonsensical rubbish, in describing a colleague mentally attacked by Raven, “It was mussed something awful. His think-stuff was like freshly stirred porridge.” (33)

It is incredibly sexist, Leina and Mavis, one can assume, are equally powerful beings but apparently according to Russell’s male characters fraught with female tendencies, Charles explains to Raven that “ Mavis got a call from Leina. As usual they gabbed an hour about personal matters before Leina remembered she’d come through to tell us you were on the Fantome. It seems she’d sooner you had kept to your proper job”

“Females remain females throughout the whole of eternity,” Raven offered. (67)

Also both Raven and Charles come across as incredibly egotistical. Normally we associate the villains with monologuing but they go on forever baiting a rebel named Thorstein, because as Russell explains later, they have to really be threatened before they can defend themselves. They are also fairly callous about individual human life, although it is not an overly violent book. Fletcher Pratt, in the Saturday Review of 6 June 1953[2] wrote: Exciting semi-classic, but is this the way super-minds work?” One hopes not, and Pratt really captures my misgivings here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinels_From_Space

So what did I like. In one scene we see Raven and Leina reclined in chairs under a glass dome in their home. They are not looking at the night sky as much as listening to the fragments of the mental traffic of their colleagues' efforts against the Deneb race spreading across the universe, “scouting warily around Bluefire, a condensing giant. Twenty black ships of destroyer types.” "repeatedly, but complete lack of common ground makes it impossible to communicate with these Flutterers.” (150) the messages point to, a vast relatively peaceful campaign against Deneb expansion and conquest.

For most of my life I have had trouble falling sleep, so in my early teens I would lie in the dark with my transistor radio listening to the world or what bits of the world I could receive, so this passage struck a real chord. I have encountered this before in my SF reading, the signals from the lost starships in Starmasters' Gambit by Gerard Klein, or when reading about the seashell (thimble) radios used by the fireman Montag’s wife Mildred in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. These passages in Sentinels of Space

really resonate with me. Also the ending came as a pleasant surprise, I admit one of the things I liked least about Wasp was the ending. 

As a writer Russell can be a bit uneven but his story "Allamagoosa" won the short story Hugo for 1955 and his novella  "And Then There Were None" was selected by members of The Science Fiction Writers of America for inclusion in Volume IIA of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. In his entry on Russell in Seekers of Tomorrow, Sam Moskowitz notes; “For good or bad, the astonishing bulk of Fortean phenomena and verging logically off into strange talents, stems from him. In fact, Russell virtually parodies the genre in his novel The Star Watchers …., which includes twelve mutations each enjoying a variation in special powers.” (150) My favourite mutant power here is 11, Insectivocals, and with that I am done.

(Sorry I did encounter some format issues I could not resolve in this post)