Summary:
Another mixed bag of stories, this time from 1944. The best known will be Arena by Fredric Brown, Killdozer by Theodore Sturgeon, No Woman Born by C. L. Moore, the three ‘City’ stories from Clifford D. Simak (which includes the classic Desertion), and Cleve Cartmill’s Deadline, which precipitated a visit to editor John W. Campbell from the FBI because of the discussion of atomic bomb technology in that story.
Others that should be better known are the The Veil of Astellar by Leigh Brackett, and When the Bough Breaks by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. A notable omission from the volume is the latter couple’s The Children’s Hour.
ISFDB link
Archive.org copy
Other reviews:1
Lawrence I. Charters, Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review, #4, May 1982
Tom Easton, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, July 1982
George Kelley, Friday’s Forgotten Books
Various, Goodreads
_____________________
Editors, Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg
Fiction:
Far Centaurus • short story by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗
Deadline • novelette by Cleve Cartmill ∗
The Veil of Astellar • novelette by Leigh Brackett ∗∗∗+
Sanity • short story by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗
Invariant • short story by John R. Pierce ∗∗
City • novelette by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗
Arena • novelette by Fredric Brown ∗∗∗+
Huddling Place • short story by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗∗
Kindness • short story by Lester del Rey ∗∗∗
Desertion • short story by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗∗∗
When the Bough Breaks • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗+
Killdozer! • novella by Theodore Sturgeon ∗∗∗∗
No Woman Born • novelette by C. L. Moore ∗∗∗∗
Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Martin H. Greenberg
Story Introductions • by Martin H. Greenberg and Isaac Asimov
_____________________
I’d originally intended to write and publish this review before the Retro Hugo nominations closed the other week but real life intervened (and not COVID-19 either), hence the long delay.
Some of the stories in this volume have already been reviewed in the half-dozen issues of Astounding I’ve read recently, so I’ve cut and pasted those half-dozen (starting with van Vogt’s Far Centaurus) in at the end—with the exception of City, which is discussed with Huddling Place and Desertion (all stories in Clifford D. Simak’s ‘City’ series).
The first of the stories that I hadn’t seen is The Veil of Astellar by Leigh Brackett, an ‘Asteroid Belt’ story. This opens with a brief prologue that tells of a manuscript arriving at Space Authority HQ, which tells of the “Veil of Astellar”, “the light that came from nowhere to swallow ships”. Them the action starts:
There had been a brawl at Madam Kan’s, on the Jekkara Low-Canal. Some little Martian glory-holer had got too high on thil, and pretty soon the spiked knuckle-dusters they use around there began to flash, and the little Martian had pulled his last feed-valve.
They threw what was left of him out onto the stones of the embankment almost at my feet. I suppose that was why I stopped—because I had to, or trip over him. And then I stared.
The thin red sunlight came down out of a clear green sky. Red sand whispered in the desert beyond the city walls, and red-brown water ran slow and sullen in the canal. The Martian lay twisted over on his back, with his torn throat spilling the reddest red of all across the dirty stones.
He was dead. He had green eyes, wide open, and he was dead. p. 66
The narrator is a spacer called J. Goat, who, after the fight, notices a couple standing near to the body: one of these is a woman called Virgie, who reminds Goat of an old flame of his called Missy. He then notices a silver locket that she wears, and also gets vague telepathic flashes from her. After the couple leave, Goat goes to a bar, where he fights with a man called Gallery.
To be honest, this is all a little confusing to begin with (it’s hard to work out what the arc of the story is going to be), and matters don’t become much clearer when Goat meets Virgie again on return to his job on the spaceship Queen of Jupiter. There, he learns that (spoiler) the locket Virgie has is the one he gave to Missy three hundred years ago, and has been passed down through the generations: Virgie is his descendant. Just as Goat realises this, the Veil surrounds the ship and teleports it to the interior of Astellar, a hollowed out asteroid in the centre of the Veil. We then find that Goat is a “Judas Goat”, an Astellarian who lives in the Veil, and was on the ship so that the Astellarians could find it.
Matters clarify considerably in the second half, where the passengers disembark and march in a dreamlike trance towards the X-crystals which control the Veil, and to their deaths (their life force will be absorbed). We also learn that the X-crystals give Goat and the other Astellarians renewed life in exchange for luring spaceships into the Veil.
The rest of the story tells of Goat’s guilt about his actions—he describes himself at one point as a “space-vampire”, and he eventually betrays his friends (and lover, Shirina) on Astellar and rebels. This involves him rescuing his daughter and destroying the X-crystals. Astellar explodes after Goat and his daughter leave, and the Veil is no more.
My account probably gives the impression that the story is rather pulp, but it is written in a way that works, and works well. It is also quite an ambitious tale, and one that weaves in a number of religious allusions and images, as well as having an ending which is (for its time and place of publication) an extraordinary wail of angst:
Somewhere in the solar system there must be somebody willing to pray for me. They used to teach me, when I was a kid, that prayer helped. I want somebody to pray for my soul, because I can’t do it for myself.
If I were glad of what I’ve done, if I had changed, perhaps then I could pray.
But I’ve gone beyond humanity, and I can’t turn back.
Maybe prayer doesn’t matter. Maybe there’s nothing beyond death but oblivion. I hope so! If I could only stop being, stop thinking, stop remembering.
I hope to all the gods of all the universes that death is the end. But I don’t know, and I’m afraid.
Afraid. Judas—Judas—Judas! I betrayed two worlds, and there couldn’t be a hell deeper than the one I live in now.
And still I’m afraid.
Why? Why should I care what happens to me? I destroyed Astellar. I destroyed Shirina, whom I loved better than anything in Creation. I destroyed my friends, my comrades—and I have destroyed myself.
And you’re not worth it. Not all the human cattle that breed in the solar system were worth Astellar, and Shirina, and the things we did beyond space and time, together.
Why did I give Missy that locket?
Why did I have to meet Virgie, with her red hair?
Why did I remember? Why did I care? Why did I do what I did?
Why was I ever born? p. 92
Parts of this story remind me of Zelazny’s work, and Asimov’s comment in the introduction seems spot on:
Could her stories of the Forties have been written in the Sixties instead, the best magazines in the field would have clawed at each other for the privilege of publishing them. p. 64
I’ll close by saying that this story doesn’t seem that different, in terms of literary intent and execution, to some of Moore’s work in Astounding. I wonder, if Brackett had got on better with Campbell,2 whether this one could have appeared there too.
Kindness by Lester del Rey has Danny as the last representative of homo sapiens on Earth: the rest of mankind has evolved into homo intelligens. Although this new race are are physically similar to Danny, they are more intelligent and perceptive, and can draw conclusions from very limited information. This is shown in two scenes: the first is where a childhood friend of Danny’s speaks to him and realises that Danny plans to escape to the belt using a spaceship in a nearby museum; the other is when Danny calls at the library to find that a historical novelist has completed a magazine serial for him, although the writer only had the first part to work from.
When Danny eventually goes to the museum he meets a professor there who takes him inside the ship and shows him around. Danny hides in the museum afterwards and, after everyone has left, he steals the ship. Danny eventually ends up on a planetoid in the Asteroid Belt that was homo sapiens last redoubt, and finds a note in one of the deserted houses that suggests there may be other homo sapien survivors, and one of them may be a woman.
The last page has the various members of homo intelligens discussing Danny’s trip, and it becomes clear that they set it up for him. The story finishes on a reflective note, where the group talk about why they did what they did, and how new races treat old ones:
The two older men watched Larsen and Thorpe leave, and silence and tobacco smoke filled the room. Finally Kenning shrugged and turned to face the professor.
“By now he’s found the note. I wonder if it was a good idea, after all? When I first came across it in that old story, I was thinking of Jack’s preliminary report on Number 67, but now I don’t know; she’s an unknown quantity, at best. Anyhow, I meant it for kindness.”
“Kindness! Kindness to repay with a few million credits and a few thousands of hours of work—plus a lie here and there—for all that we owe the boy’s race!” The professor’s voice was tired, as he dumped the contents of his pipe into a snuffer, and strode over slowly toward the great window that looked out on the night sky. “I wonder sometimes, Bryant, what kindness Neanderthaler found when the last one came to die. Or whether the race that will follow us when the darkness falls on us will have something better than such kindness.” p. 207
The story’s setup is a bit clunky and artificial, but the ending drags it up a notch. Not bad, but not ‘Best of the Year’ material.
When the Bough Breaks by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] is one of the three stories that Kuttner and/or Moore published in Astounding in 1944, and it’s saying something that this good to very good piece is the weakest of the three, but only just.
The story opens with a young couple and their young child receiving a visit by four small men with big heads. They say they are from the future and have arrived to educate Alexander, who will grow up to become an immortal superman and leader in their time. After this explanation they paralyze the parents and start the process:
Dobish came over, clambered up, and pried Alexander out of his mother’s grip. Horror moved in her eyes.
“We won’t hurt him,” Dobish said. “We just want to give him his first lesson. Have you got the basics, Finn?”
“In the bag.” Finn extracted a foot-long bag from his garments. Things came out of that bag. They came out incredibly. Soon the carpet was littered with stuff—problematical in design, nature, and use. Calderon recognized a tesseract.
The fourth dwarf, whose name, it turned out, was Quat, smiled consolingly at the distressed parents. “You watch. You can’t learn; you’ve not got the potential. You’re homo saps. But Alexander, now—”
Alexander was in one of his moods. He was diabolically gay. With the devil-possession of all babies, he refused to collaborate. He crept rapidly backwards. He burst into loud, squalling sobs. He regarded his feet with amazed joy. He stuffed his fist into his mouth and cried bitterly at the result. He talked about invisible things in a soft, cryptic monotone. He punched Dobish in the eye.
The little men had inexhaustible patience. Two hours later they were through. Calderon couldn’t see that Alexander had learned much.
Bordent twirled the object again. He nodded affably, and led the retreat. The four little men went out of the apartment, and a moment later Calderon and Myra could move. p. 225
The rest of the story charts Alexander’s development under the tutelage of the four men. He learns to talk, develops telepathic powers, and learns to teleport. He also learns how to teleport others and, at one point, sends his mother to the store for candy. Then he starts giving his parents electric shocks, and starts behaving more malevolently. At this point, Alexander’s father, Calderon, discusses disciplining Alexander with Bordent, the leader of the four, but the latter refuses.
The final section of the story (spoiler) has Alexander playing with a forbidden blue egg. At this point the traumatised and frightened parents vacillate about intervening, even though they suspect the results may be lethal. Alexander completes the egg, and vanishes in a flash of white light.
This latter section is well executed. Not only is the parents’ fear and ambivalent attitude to their son convincingly developed (one wonders to what extent this taps into all parents’ potential or sometime ambivalence about their spawn) but the manner of Alexander’s demise has a subtlety that would be missing in a more explicit attempt on his life by the parents (which is what I expected).
This story has an early 1940’s, Twonky-ish, execution for the most part (e.g. the inclusion of strange little men with big heads) although the subject matter is more Mimsy Were the Borogoves (educational devices transform children into super-beings). However, the ending is darker and more emotionally complicated than in that latter piece, and it has a satisfying, albeit troubling, ending. I almost gave it four stars.
Killdozer! by Theodore Sturgeon3 gets off to (surprisingly, considering its ‘classic’ status) a clunky, data-dump start which tells of an ancient war involving an alien lifeform of “tangible electrons” which ends up trapped on Earth. It would have been better if this had been chopped up into smaller sections and inserted into the narrative. That said, when the story gets going, it has an immersive opening section which portrays a small group of civilian contractors on a Pacific island during WWII, who are there to build a runway for the military. Tom Jaeger is the boss, and one of several clearly drawn individuals in a tale that is much better characterised than any other contemporaneous SF work I can think of. One of the men, Dennis, is the obvious troublemaker of the bunch, and a racist to boot. This latter characteristic comes to the fore in several passages which make the story one of the few of the time which has an obvious, if occasional, anti-racist slant. In the following extract Dennis comments about another man, Rivera, a Puerto Rican mechanic’s assistant:
“Why doesn’t that monkey stick to his grease guns?”
Tom turned and took the chewed end of a match stick out of his mouth. He said nothing, because he had for some time been trying to make a habit of saying nothing to Joe Dennis.
Dennis was an ex-accountant, drafted out of an office at the last gasp of a defunct project in the West Indies. He had become an operator because they needed operators badly. He had been released with alacrity from the office because of his propensity for small office politics. It was a game he still played, and completely aside from his boiled-looking red face and his slightly womanish walk, he was out of place in the field; for boot-licking and back-stabbing accomplish even less out on the field than they do in an office. Tom, trying so hard to keep his mind on his work, had to admit to himself that of all Dennis’ annoying traits the worst was that he was good a pan operator as could be found anywhere, and no one could deny it.
Dennis certainly didn’t.
“I’ve seen the day when anyone catching one of those goonies so much as sitting on a machine during lunch, would kick his fanny,” Dennis groused. “Now they give ’em a man’s work and a man’s pay.”
“Doin’ a man’s work, ain’t he?” Tom said.
“He’s a Puerto Rican!”
Tom turned and looked at him levelly. “Where was it you said you come from,” he mused. “Oh yeah. Georgia.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Tom was already striding away. “Tell you as soon as I have to,” he flung back over his shoulder. p. 253-254
The action starts when Tom and Rivera go on a recce and come upon a mound where there is an odd looking stone. They move it and find what looks like a wall underneath. Tom guides Riviera in with the bulldozer and, when the wall gives way, the alien energy-being from the prologue escapes from the enclosure and possesses the machine. The bulldozer goes wild, and Riviera is thrown from it, his back broken. After Tom manages to fight the bulldozer to a stop he disables it by emptying the fuel tank before going for help.
When Rivera is finally brought back to base, Tom gets the shocking news that the bulldozer used the petrol starter motor (not its main engine) to move itself to within twenty feet of Rivera before it burnt out.
The next part of the story chronicles the mistrust that arises between the men, some of whom think that Tom attacked Rivera (who subsequently dies). Looming in the background is the bulldozer, which Chub the mechanic has started repairing. Even though Tom orders that no-one is to start the machine apart from him, Dennis does so once it is fixed. The final third of the story then tells of the alien-possessed machine’s killing spree, and the men’s attempt to destroy it.
This is a pretty good adventure story, but my four star rating is more for the character driven first two-thirds than the more straightforward (and perhaps overlong) action of the finale.
No Woman Born by C. L. Moore opens with narrator James Harris visiting Deirdre and Maltzer: Deirdre is a superstar actress who, after an accident, has had her brain put into a robot body designed by Maltzer.
During this first part, Harris sees her for the first time, and later sees how her body, although quite different from the original, conveys her essence:
The first impression that his eyes and mind took from sight of her was shocked and incredulous, for his brain said to him unbelievingly, “This is Deirdre! She hasn’t changed at all!”
Then the shift of perspective took over, and even more shockingly, eye and brain said, “No, not Deirdre—not human. Nothing but metal coils. Not Deirdre at all—” And that was the worst. It was like waking from a dream of someone beloved and lost, and facing anew, after that heartbreaking reassurance of sleep, the inflexible fact that nothing can bring the lost to life again. Deirdre was gone, and this was only machinery heaped in a flowered chair.
Then the machinery moved, exquisitely, smoothly, with a grace as familiar as the swaying form he remembered. The sweet, husky voice of Deirdre said, “It’s me, John darling. It really is, you know.” p. 325Then she put her featureless helmeted head a little to one side, and he heard her laughter as familiar in its small, throaty, intimate sound as he had ever heard it from her living throat. And every gesture, every attitude, every flowing of motion into motion was so utterly Deirdre that the overwhelming illusion swept his mind again and this was the flesh-and-blood woman as clearly as if he saw her standing there whole once more, like Phoenix from the fire. p. 329
Deirdre and Harris talk at length, and their conversation concludes with her announcement that, rather than hide away from humanity as Maltzer would like, she is going to do a surprise performance that evening. Maltzer, however, has concerns about her mental state, and notes that any performance may be affected by the fact that she only has two of five senses, sight and hearing. However, when Deirdre later performs, she is a huge success.
Afterwards, Meltzer shows signs of increasing agitation, and determines to make Deirdre stop performing. Harris disagrees with him, and doesn’t believe that Maltzer would force her, but Maltzer eventually confronts Deirdre, and what he sees as her increasing despair, by threatening to commit suicide. At this point there is a long discussion about Frankenstein’s monster, which ends when she quickly moves to pull Maltzer away from the window ledge he is perched on. She tells him she is not despairing, but is scared that she has become superhuman and may lose touch with the human race.
The last few lines suggest this is indeed the case:
Her voice was soft and familiar in Harris’s ears, the voice Deirdre had spoken and sung with, sweetly enough to enchant a world. But as preoccupation came over her a certain flatness crept into the sound. When she was not listening to her own voice, it did not keep quite to the pitch of trueness. It sounded as if she spoke in a room of brass, and echoes from the walls resounded in the tones that spoke there.
“I wonder,” she repeated, the distant taint of metal already in her voice. p. 368
This is one of those stories that is quite hard to synopsise as the story is actually quite slight, and most of the (well-written) wordage is used to create mood or images, although there are also various philosophical discussions throughout about what it is to be human, mortal, etc.:
Maltzer says my brain will probably wear out quite normally—except, of course, that I won’t have to worry about looking old!—and when it gets tired and stops, the body I’m in won’t be any longer. The magnetic muscles that hold it into my own shape and motions will let go when the brain lets go, and there’ll be nothing but a . . . a pile of disconnected rings. If they ever assemble it again, it won’t be me.” She hesitated. “I like that, John,” she said, and he felt from behind the mask a searching of his face.
He knew and understood that somber satisfaction. He could not put it into words; neither of them wanted to do that. But he understood. It was the conviction of mortality, in spite of her immortal body. She was not cut off from the rest of her race in the essence of their humanity, for though she wore a body of steel and they perishable flesh, yet she must perish too, and the same fears and faiths still united her to mortals and humans, though she wore the body of Oberon’s inhuman knight. Even in her death she must be unique—dissolution in a shower of tinkling and clashing rings, he thought, and almost envied her the finality and beauty of that particular death—but afterward, oneness with humanity in however much or little awaited them all. So she could feel that this exile in metal was only temporary, in spite of everything.
(And providing, of course, that the mind inside the metal did not veer from its inherited humanity as the years went by. A dweller in a house may impress his personality upon the walls, but subtly the walls too, may impress their own shape upon the ego of the man. Neither of them thought of that, at the time.) p. 333-334“I’m not—well, sub-human,” she said [to Maltzer], a faint note of indignation in her voice. “I’ll prove it in a minute, but I want to say something else first. You must promise to wait and listen. There’s a flaw in your argument, and I resent it. I’m not a Frankenstein monster made out of dead flesh. I’m myself—alive. You didn’t create my life, you only preserved it I’m not a robot, with compulsions built into me that I have to obey. I’m free-willed and independent and Maltzer—I’m human.” p. 359
If you like literary SF you’ll probably like this; if you are more attuned to science fiction with more mechanistic underpinnings then it may find it little more than a well-written melodrama. Maltzer’s fears, which drive the narrative, seem rather confected to be honest, and there is no real explanation given for Deirdre’s superhuman powers (beyond the fact that these just happened during her construction.)
I enjoyed the story while I was in the process of reading it, and it’s certainly impressive in parts, but it seems rather frothy to me—afterwards, I wasn’t quite sure what the story was about, other than the idea, perhaps, that the cyborgisation of a person may rob them, over time, of some of their humanity.4
This anthology has three of the four ‘City’ series stories which Clifford D. Simak published in Astounding in 1944. These, and a handful of other stories (most of the rest of which also appeared in Astounding from 1946-7) would eventually be incorporated, with linking material, into the International Fantasy Award-winning novel City.5
The first of the three stories here is also called City, and has a beginning which will, to those of us who have robot vacuum cleaners and the like, feel quite contemporary:
Gramp Stevens sat in a lawn chair, watching the mower at work, feeling the warm, soft sunshine seep into his bones. The mower reached the edge of the lawn, clucked to itself like a contented hen, made a neat turn and trundled down another swath. The bag holding the clippings bulged.
Suddenly the mower stopped and clicked excitedly. A panel in its side snapped open and a cranelike arm reached out. Grasping steel fingers fished around in the grass, came up triumphantly with a stone clutched tightly, dropped the stone into a small container, disappeared back into the panel again. The lawn mower gurgled, purred on again, following its swath.
Gramp grumbled at it with suspicion. p. 117
When Gramp’s friend Ole drives by in his car, he stops to talk. During this conversation we find that internal combustion cars are obsolescent, the roads unused, and towns and cities are largely abandoned. Gramps reflects further on these subjects when he later goes for a walk around the deserted neighbourhood:
The years had moved too fast. Years that had brought the family plane and helicopter, leaving the auto to rust in some forgotten place, the unused roads to fall into disrepair. Years that had virtually wiped out the tilling of the soil with the rise of hydroponics. Years that had brought cheap land with the disappearance of the farm as an economic unit, had sent city people scurrying out into the country where each man, for less than the price of a city lot, might own broad acres.
Years that had revolutionized the construction of homes to a point where families simply walked away from their old homes to the new ones that could be bought, custom-made, for less than half the price of a prewar structure and could be changed at small cost, to accommodate need of additional space or just a passing whim.
Gramp sniffed. Houses that could be changed each year, just like one would shift around the furniture. What kind of living was that?
He plodded slowly down the dusty path that was all that remained of what a few years before had been a busy residential street. A street of ghosts, Gramp told himself—of furtive, little ghosts that whispered in the night. Ghosts of playing children, ghosts of upset tricycles and canted coaster wagons. Ghosts of gossiping housewives. Ghosts of shouted greetings. Ghosts of flaming fireplaces and chimneys smoking of a winter night.
Little puffs of dust rose around his feet and whitened the cuffs of his trousers.
There was the old Adams place across the way. Adams had been mighty proud of it, he remembered. Gray field stone front and picture windows. Now the stone was green with creeping moss and the broken windows gaped with ghastly leer. Weeds choked the lawn and blotted out the stoop. An elm tree was pushing its branches against the gable.
Gramp could remember the day Adams had planted that elm tree.
For a moment he stood there in the grass-grown street, feet in the dust, both hands clutching the curve of his cane, eyes closed.
Through the fog of years he heard the cry of playing children, the barking of Conrad’s yapping pooch from down the street. And there was Adams, stripped to the waist, plying the shovel, scooping out the hole, with the elm tree, roots wrapped in burlap, lying on the lawn.
May, 1946. Forty-four years ago. Just after he and Adams had come home from the war together. p. 141
At that point a young man arrives and starts talking to Gramps. He eventually identifies himself as Adam’s grandson, and he is there to visit the old house.
The next part of the story introduces Webster, who arrives at a city council meeting where there is an argument about burning empty houses to move squatters on and prevent crime. Webster quarrels with the other men, and loses his job, but he ends by giving a speech which says they should be glad the cities are dead, and people and industries dispersed, otherwise humanity would have perished in an atomic war.
After this long (largely talking heads) section, Webster goes to the Bureau for Human Adjustment, where Taylor, the man who interviews him, does more talking about recent changes, and finishes by offering Webster a job.
The rest of the tale (spoiler) concerns a stand-off between the police and Gramps and the squatters. This is resolved when Gramps and the grandson turn up at city hall to reveal that the grandson has bought all the houses that have unpaid taxes. He wants the city charter dissolved, and plans to turn the city into a museum to show people how their ancestors lived.
There are some good parts in this story, such as the material about a transition to a post-capitalist society, but there’s also a lot of speechifying and data-dumping, and the standoff at the end feels rather contrived. A middling start to a major series.
The second in the ‘City’ series is Huddling Place, which takes place over a hundred years later (it opens with a Jerome A. Webster at the funeral of Nelson F. Webster in 2117).6 After this, we get an update on societal conditions:
John J., the first John J., had come after the breakup of the cities, after men had forsaken, once and for all, the twentieth century huddling places, had broken free of the tribal instinct to stick together in one cave or in one clearing against a common foe or a common fear. An instinct that had become outmoded, for there were no fears or foes. Man revolting against the herd instinct economic and social conditions had impressed upon him in ages past. A new security and a new sufficiency had made it possible to break away.
The trend had started back in the twentieth century, more than two hundred years before, when men moved to country homes to get fresh air and elbow room and a graciousness in life that communal existence, in its strictest sense, never had given them.
And here was the end result. A quiet living. A peace that could only come with good things. The sort of life that men had yearned for years to have. A manorial existence, based on old family homes and leisurely acres, with atomics supplying power and robots in place of serfs. p. 177-178
The story continues with Webster in his study, where he has a virtual teleconference with Juwain, a philosopher friend who lives on Mars. They discuss Webster’s reluctance to visit him there, and also Webster’s son’s upcoming visit to the planet. When Webster later goes to see his son depart at the spaceport he has an agoraphobia attack and, as he tries to get Jenkins to arrange transport home, he is told that his father and grandfather suffered the same condition.
The rest of the story pivots around Webster’s condition. He writes an article pointing out that almost no-one wants to leave home nowadays, then (spoiler) an old acquaintance called Claybourne calls from Mars, and tells Webster, a surgeon, that he is needed to perform an life-saving operation on Juwain. Webster says he can’t come, but Claybourne says that Juwain is on the verge of a philosophical breakthrough that is vital to humanity, and that a ship will come to pick him up.
Webster packs for the trip and tries to control his agoraphobia. After he has been waiting for some time, Jenkins tells him that two men arrived earlier to pick him up earlier, but Jenkins told them that Webster couldn’t possibly go. The story ends with this:
Webster stiffened, felt chill fear gripping at his heart. Hands groping for the edge of the desk, he sat down in the chair, sensed the walls of the room closing in about him, a trap that would never let him go. p. 191
This tale is mentioned along with Desertion as one of the best of the ‘City’ stories but, although I liked it better than City, I didn’t like it as much as the third tale Census (Astounding, September 1944), which is not included in this volume.
The fourth in the ‘City’ stories is Desertion, and it is set in a station on Jupiter. There, they are transforming men into the native “loper” life form and sending them out onto the surface. The story opens with the chief of the station, Fowler, briefing Allen—the fifth candidate for conversion. Fowler does this against the backdrop of the converter operator, Miss Stanley’s, obvious disapproval (two earlier two-man teams have not returned).
The second half of the story sees Allen also fail to return, at which point Fowler decides to transform and go outside himself, along with his dog Towser. When this happens they find themselves in a wonderland where they can both talk to each other telepathically and, as they stand by an ammonia waterfall, they realise that they can both do much more:
“The music,” said Towser.
“Yes, what about it?”
“The music,” said Towser, “is vibrations. Vibrations of water falling.”
“But, Towser, you don’t know about vibrations.”
“Yes, I do,” contended Towser. “It just popped into my head.”
Fowler gulped mentally. “Just popped!”
And suddenly, within his own head, he held a formula—the formula for a process that would make metal to withstand the pressure of Jupiter.
He stared, astounded, at the waterfall and swiftly his mind took the many colors and placed them in their exact sequence in the spectrum. Just like that. Just out of blue sky. Out of nothing, for he knew nothing either of metals or of colors.
“Towser,” he cried. ‘Towser, something’s happening to us!”
“Yeah, I know,” said Towser.
“It’s our brains,” said Fowler. “We’re using them, all of them, down to the last hidden corner. Using them to figure out things we should have known all the time. Maybe the brains of Earth things naturally are slow and foggy. Maybe we are the morons of the universe. Maybe we are fixed so we have to do things the hard way.”
And, in the new sharp clarity of thought that seemed to grip him, he knew that it would not only be the matter of colors in a waterfall or metals that would resist the pressure of Jupiter, he sensed other things, things not yet quite clear.
A vague whispering that hinted of greater things, of mysteries beyond the pale of human thought, beyond even the pale of human imagination. Mysteries, fact, logic built on reasoning. Things that any brain should know if it used all its reasoning power.
“We’re still mostly Earth,” he said. “We’re just beginning to learn a few of the things we are to know—a few of the things that were kept from us as human beings, perhaps because we were human beings. Because our human bodies were poor bodies. Poorly equipped for thinking, poorly equipped in certain senses that one has to have to know. Perhaps even lacking in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge.”
He stared back at the dome, a tiny black thing dwarfed by the distance.
Back there were men who couldn’t see the beauty that was Jupiter. Men who thought that swirling clouds and lashing rain obscured the face of the planet. Unseeing human eyes. Poor eyes. Eyes that could not see the beauty in the clouds, that could not see through the storms. Bodies that could not feel the thrill of trilling music stemming from the rush of broken water.
Men who walked alone, in terrible loneliness, talking with their tongue like Boy Scouts wigwagging out their messages, unable to reach out and touch one another’s mind as he could reach out and touch Towser’s mind. Shut off forever from that personal, intimate contact with other living things.
After these epiphanies, both Fowler and Towser are reluctant to return to the dome and devolve back to man and dog. This sets up the memorable closing lines of the story:
“I can’t go back,” said Towser.
“Nor I,” said Fowler.
“They would turn me back into a dog,” said Towser.
“And me,” said Fowler, “back into a man.” p. 220
This truly classic story provided me with a massive sense-of-wonder hit when I was twelve or so, and it still holds up pretty well today (although the idea of a dog with fleas on a planetary station probably needs updating).
I note that this story, and the previous tale Census (not included here), both have an elegiac feel—at this stage in the series we are at a point where humanity and its civilization is dying. Both these pieces are, I would suggest, anti-Galactic Empire stories: rather than mankind spreading out through the universe and subjugating it to its will, it is quietly fading away.7
Apart from City above, the other stories I’ve already reviewed are pasted in below.
Far Centaurus by A. E. van Vogt gets off to a rather good start (even if it does lash about like a broken-backed snake later on) with Bill waking up from deep sleep on a starship. After an extended period of rehabilitation (the automated massage lasts for almost an hour), he notes the time:
I leaned over the control chair, and glanced at the chronometer.
It said: 53 years, 7 months, 2 weeks, 0 days, 0 hours and 27 minutes.
Fifty-three years! A little blindly, almost blankly: Back on Earth, the people we had known, the young men we’d gone to college with, that girl who had kissed me at the party given us the night we left—they were all dead. Or dying of old age.
I remembered the girl very vividly. She was pretty, vivacious, a complete stranger. She had laughed as she offered her red lips, and she had said “A kiss for the ugly one, too.” She’d be a grandmother now, or in her grave.
Tears came to my eyes. I brushed them away, and began to heat the can of concentrated liquid that was to be my first food. Slowly, my mind calmed. p. 69
Bill then gets up and performs some routine tasks, during which he finds Pelham, one of the other three crewmembers, dead (the drug they take has a death rate of ten per cent). He checks on the other men, then suits up and disposes of Pelham’s body. Bill notes these events in the log, and then goes back to sleep.
The rest of the first third of so of the story details Bill’s waking periods on the long journey to Alpha Centauri: during one such episode he sees a spaceship on fire behind them; in another he reads a written note from Blake—the men take turns waking— about the third man’s, Renfrew’s, mental stability.
Eventually they arrive at Alpha Centauri, and (spoiler) the story becomes something else entirely when they are greeted by a future human civilization. It turns out that, after the four men left, humanity designed faster ships which arrived long before they did and colonised the system. The ambassador responsible for dealing with the men welcomes them, and tells them they have been financially provided for (there is money in the bank). He also notes that, as they smell particularly unpleasant to current day humans, his people would appreciate it if they could keep to themselves.
We later get a science lecture about star travel before Renfrew (now cured of his madness) buys a spaceship, whereupon they all leave. Renfrew later flies them into a star which, because of the future science gimmick, sends them back in time to just after they departed from Earth.
The first part of this is a good account of life on a suspended animation starship, but the rest does not convince or gel.
Deadline by Cleve Cartmill has a Seilla (Allies) spy called Ybor Sebrof (Roby Forbes) dropped into Sixa (Axis)8 territory:
All he had to do was to penetrate into the stronghold of the enemy, find Dr. Sitruc, kill him, and destroy the most devastating weapon of history. p. 155
After landing Roby kills some enemy soldiers, and then encounters a young woman who has been following him. She turns out to be the director of the underground (what are the chances?), and pulls a gun on him as she thinks he is a Sixa agent.
Up to this point the story, a fast moving pulp, isn’t that bad, but it is shamefully padded from then on (Roby’s imprisoned; the woman and her henchman threaten to torture him when he won’t reveal his mission; they send for someone to identify him; an enemy patrol comes to the house; the messenger returns with news that the person that could identify him is dead, yada, yada, yada).
Eventually, Roby escapes and manages to get a patrol of enemy soldiers to take him to see Dr Sitruc, the inventor of the super-weapon. Cartmill finally gets to the point of the story, which is pasting in the atomic technology description he had received from John Campbell:
Now U-235 can raise the temperature of local matter to where it will, uh, ‘burn’, and give off energy. So let’s say we set off a little pinch of U-235. Surrounding matter also explodes, as it is raised to an almost inconceivable temperature. It cools rapidly; within perhaps one-hundred-millionth of a second, it is down below the point of ignition. Then maybe before it’s down to one million degrees hot, and a minute or so may elapse before it is visible in the normal sense. Now that visible radiation will represent no more than one-hundred-thousandth of the total radiation at one million degrees—but even so, it would be several hundred times more brilliant than the sun. Right?”
Dr. Sitruc nodded. [Roby] thought there was a touch of deference in his nod.
“That’s pretty much the temperature cycle of a U-235 plus surrounding matter explosion, Dr. Sitruc. I’m oversimplifying, I guess, but we don’t need to go into detail. Now that radiation pressure is the stuff that’s potent. The sheer momentum, physical pressure of light from the stuff at one million degrees, would amount to tons and tons and tons of pressure. It would blow down buildings like a titanic wind if it weren’t for the fact that absorption of such appalling energy would volatilize the buildings before they could move out of the way. Right?” Dr. Sitruc nodded again. He almost smiled.
“All right,” [Roby] went on. He now entered the phase of this contest where he was guessing, and he’d get no second guess. “What we need is a damper, something to hold the temperature of surrounding matter down. In that way, we can limit the effect of the explosion to desired areas, and prevent it from destroying cities on the opposite side of Cathor. The method of applying the damper depends on the exact mechanical structure of the bomb itself. pp. 173-174He stopped before the bomb, looked down at it. He nodded, ponderously. “I see,” he said, remembering Sworb’s drawings and the careful explanations he had received. “Two cast-iron hemispheres, clamped over the orange segments of cadmium alloy. And the fuse—I see it is in—a tiny can of cadmium alloy containing a speck of radium in a beryllium holder and a small explosive powerful enough to shatter the cadmium walls. Then—correct me if I’m wrong, will you?—the powdered uranium oxide runs together in the central cavity. The radium shoots neutrons into this mass—and the U-235 takes over from there. Right? p. 174
—That’s not Roby talking to Sitruc there, that’s Campbell pitching to the Los Alamos/Manhattan Project scientists.
Roby eventually manages to overcome Dr Sitruc and kill him (he grabs Sitruc’s gun with his tail—the story is supposedly set on an alien planet, although there is very little detail) and then walks out with the bomb (because, of course, the chief enemy scientist would interrogate an agent in the room that houses the weapon, wouldn’t he?) Roby gets picked up by an allied plane, and during the flight back they dismantle and scatter the bomb.
This is a pretty awful story but, when it was published, the detailed discussion of atomic bomb technology came to the attention of the authorities (security officers at Los Alamos overheard a group of scientists discussing the story in a copy of Astounding), and an agent visited both Campbell and Cartmill. There has been a lot of commentary about this incident over the years, mostly celebratory9 (SF fans of the time craved serious attention—something that is still true today), but the episode seems irresponsible to me, and could have had serious repercussions.
I suspect that, If it wasn’t for the interest of the authorities, the story, and Cartmill, would be long forgotten.
Sanity by Fritz Leiber is a talking-heads story which opens with World Manager Carrsbury speaking to General Secretary Phy in his office. He explains that he has come to a realisation:
Whether my case was due chiefly to heredity, or to certain unusual accidents of environment, or to both, is unimportant. The point is that a person had been born who was in a position to criticize the present state of mankind in the light of the past, to diagnose its condition, and to begin its cure.
For a long time I refused to face the facts, but finally my researches—especially those in the literature of the twentieth century—left me no alternative. The mentality of mankind had become—aberrant. p. 163
He goes on to explain to Phy that his analysis led him to train a cadre of political leaders “free of neurotic tendencies”, and that he set up a secret police force to protect himself. Phy counters with a vacuous grin, and the statement that the semi-solid material he has been kneading while listening to Carrsbury came from a hole he cut in his sofa.
Phy, though, isn’t as mad as he sounds: he goes on to tell Carrsbury that (spoiler) his attempts to reduce the amount of insanity in the world have been subverted. Phy becomes demonstrative, and one of Carrsbury’s security guards appears. As Carrsbury leaves for an appointment, Phy asks to accompany him, and the three of them end up in an elevator. There, the tables are further turned:
“Do you know how many floors there are in this building?”
Carrsbury was not immediately conscious of the new note in Phy’s voice, but he reacted to it.
“One hundred,” he replied promptly.
“Then,” asked Phy, “just where are we?”
Carr opened his eyes to the darkness. One hundred twenty-seven, blinked the floor numeral. One hundred twenty-eight. One hundred twenty-nine. Something cold dragged at Carrsbury’s stomach, pulled at his brain. He felt as if his mind were being slowly and irresistibly twisted. He thought of hidden dimensions, of unsuspected holes in space. Something remembered from elementary physics danced through his thoughts: If it were possible for an elevator to keep moving upward with uniform acceleration, no one inside an elevator could determine whether the effects they were experiencing were due to acceleration or to gravity—whether the elevator were standing motionless on some planet or shooting up at ever-increasing velocity through free space.
One hundred forty-one. One hundred forty-two.
“Or as if you were rising through consciousness into an unsuspected realm of mentality lying above,” suggested Phy in his new voice, with its hint of gentle laughter. p. 170
They eventually arrive at a transparent section of the building that Carrsbury did not know existed. They wait for an aircraft to come and pick Carrsbury up. Phy explains that the only reason that Carrsbury was allowed to do what he wanted was so he could express himself, like everyone in the world, but that now that must stop.
After Carrsbury leaves, Phy turns to the guard and delivers the story’s neat closing line:
“I’m glad to see the last of that fellow,” [Phy] muttered, more to himself than to [the guard], as they plummeted toward the roof, “He was beginning to have a very disturbing influence on me. In fact, I was beginning to fear for my”—his expression became suddenly vacuous—“sanity.” p. 173
I’m not sure this makes much sense as a story to be honest, but its paranoid feel, the switch-around, and the biter-bit ending work well enough.
Invariant by John R. Pierce is an okay piece about Homer Green, whose experimental immortality treatment has (spoiler) left him with memories that are as “invariant” as the other cells in his body. This becomes apparent during an interview conducted by a man from 2170, who tells Green (spoiler) that it isn’t 1943 anymore—even though he will shortly forget that information.
Arena by Fredric Brown opens with Carson, a scout ship pilot, engaging an alien Outsider warship beyond the orbit of Pluto—he then wakes up naked, lying on blue sand under a blue dome, and notices a red spherical object in the distance.
Carson hears a disembodied voice which says that the speaker, an alien super-being, chanced upon the human and the Outsider fleets about to destroy each other. Rather than allowing this mutual destruction to occur (neither the human race or Outsiders would win outright, and both races would be left crippled), the super-being decrees that Carson and an Outsider (the red sphere) will engage in single combat: the loser’s race will be annihilated, leaving the victor unscathed.
The rest of the story tells of the fight between the Carson and the Outsider, which starts when the “Roller” moves towards him but is stopped by a force field. The pair throw rocks at each other for a while, and then the Outsider lobs a decapitated blue lizard which it caught and killed.
The events of the rest of the story unfold against Carson’s increasing thirst and weakness, and involve his unsuccessful attempt at negotiating peace (Carson can sense the Outsider’s malevolent emotions in response), and experiments to see what will pass through the force field. Eventually, Carson passes out, but comes round when one of the lizards in the dome approaches him:
“Hello,” said the voice.
It was a small, thin voice. It sounded like—
He opened his eyes and turned his head. It was a lizard.
“Go away,” Carson wanted to say. “Go away; you’re not really there, or you’re there but not really talking. I’m imagining things again.”
But he couldn’t talk; his throat and tongue were past all speech with the dryness. He closed his eyes again.
“Hurt,” said the voice. “Kill. Hurt—kill. Come.”
He opened his eyes again. The blue ten-legged lizard was still there.
It ran a little way along the barrier, came back, started off again, and came back.
“Hurt,” it said. “Kill. Come.”
Again it started off, and came back. Obviously it wanted Carson to follow it along the barrier.
He closed his eyes again. The voice kept on. The same three meaningless words. Each time he opened his eyes, it ran off and came back.
“Hurt. Kill. Come.”
Carson groaned. There would be no peace unless he followed the blasted thing. Like it wanted him to.
He followed it, crawling. Another sound, a high-pitched squealing, came to his ears and grew louder.
There was something lying in the sand, writhing, squealing. Something small, blue, that looked like a lizard and yet didn’t—
Then he saw what it was—the lizard whose legs the Roller had pulled off, so long ago. But it wasn’t dead; it had come back to life and was wriggling and screaming in agony.
“Hurt,” said the other lizard. “Hurt. Kill. Kill.”
Carson understood. He took the flint knife from his belt and killed the tortured creature. The live lizard scurried off quickly. p. 89-90
Carson (spoiler) then has an epiphany about the nature of the force-field, which leads directly to the climactic events of the story where he renders himself temporarily unconscious to get through the force field.
This is an inventive and entertaining story, and is much better than the later Star Trek episode (which made Brown’s story more famous today than it might otherwise have been).10
The Introduction, by Martin H. Greenberg, is mostly a list of war news, but also covers other sporting, cultural, etc., events. He has this to say about the SF field:
In the real world it was another good year, despite the preoccupations of the war and the death of Captain Future [magazine] in the Spring.
Wondrous things were happening: Olaf Stapledon published Sirius. Renaissance by Raymond F. Jones and The Riddle of the Tower by J. D. Beresford and Esme Wynne-Tyson appeared as did World’s Beginning by Robert Ardrey, who would later achieve fame in another field. The Lady and the Monster, one of several film versions of Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain, was released. And an Australian sailor named A. Bertram Chandler made his maiden voyage into reality in May with “This Means War.”
And distant wings were beating as P. J. Plauger, James Sallis, Bruce Pennington, Stanley Schmidt, George Lucas, Katherine Kurtz, Vemor Vinge, Jack Chalker, David Gerrold, Peter Weston, and Vance Aandahl were born. Let us travel back to that honored year of 1944 and enjoy the best stories that the real world bequeathed to us. p. 11
There are also the usual Story introductions by both Martin H. Greenberg and Isaac Asimov. There are a number of interesting comments, and it’s worth reading all of the story introductions (click on the images above for higher resolution ones that are easier to read).
In particular, there is this about Asimov and Greenberg’s selection process:
The way these books are put together is that Marty and I begin by discussing possible stories. Marty then gets about twice as many as we can include and sends me the Xeroxes. I read them all and mark them OK, ?, or X. The first group are in, the third group are out, and the middle group are worth further discussion. p. 110
In conclusion, this is an anthology that is worth getting for the Brackett, Brown, Simak, Kuttner & Moore, Sturgeon, and Moore stories. I note in passing that the Brackett, Sturgeon and Moore stories show distinct signs of a more literary form of SF (one that will have more imagery, emotion, characterisation, style, etc.), something that I’ve not seen much of in earlier stories. Simak’s series offers a different philosophical path for SF.
Some of the other pieces are good enough if not outstanding, but I don’t know what the van Vogt, Cartmill, Pierce or the first of the Simak’s are doing here. I also don’t understand how Moore & Kuttner’s The Children’s Hour is missing. In my opinion, it’s the best of their three Astounding stories, and I would have included all three of them in this volume.11 ●
_____________________
1. Tom Easton’s review of this volume is a general one (although he does note that it is the year of his birth). He finishes with:
It was a good year for stories, too. Asimov and Martin Greenberg were able to pick several installments of Simak’s City, plus stories by van Vogt, Brackett, Leiber, Sturgeon (“Killdozer”), del Rey, and more. Perhaps most notable of all, though not for literary quality, was the story that gave Astounding’s reputation for prophecy its greatest boost—Cleve Gartmill’s “Deadline”; that one brought U.S. intelligence agents into Campbell’s office, asking, “Who leaked? Who told you how an A-bomb works?” You’ve heard the tale, I’m sure; it’s really better than the story itself.
If you go to the 1945 Retro Hugo Awards page above you can also find links to individual reviews of 1944 stories in the “SF” and “RR” columns of the table provided.
2. Brackett says in her Tangent Online interview that she stopped submitting stories to Campbell after a “vicious” rejection. She adds later on:
One big trouble I had trying to sell to Campbell was of course the fact that I did not have any great scientific or engineering background. And this is one thing he insisted on in his stories, and I admit uh, Ed had a great background in physics and electrical engineering that I didn’t have, and I tried to make up for it by writing a new type of story. But it was just not Campbell’s type of story.
I’m not sure the comment about Campbell insisting on “scientific or engineering background” is quite true. I’m not sure that The Children’s Hour has one, and I could probably list several other examples.
3. Paul Williams provides extensive story notes for Killdozer! at the back of Killdozer!, Volume III: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books, 1996). Here are some brief extracts:
In terms of money and acclaim, it was arguably the most successful story of the first decade of his career. And in Sturgeon’s own telling of his life story, it punctuates his longest bout of “writer’s block,” usually described by him (in interviews, and in the foreword to his 1971 collection Sturgeon Is Alive and Well . . .) as lasting for six years, 1940 to 1946, with “Killdozer!” a solitary interruption in the middle, 1943.
Close examination of documentary evidence, primarily copies of letters to and from Sturgeon during and after this period, allows a more accurate dating. He did continue to write as long as he was still in New York, which he left (in order to manage his uncle’s hotel at Treasure Beach on the island of Jamaica) on June 28, 1941. Although he and his wife expected that the hotel job and change of scene would make it easier for him to go on writing fiction, he did not do any writing until April of 1944, on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, when he wrote a (probably mainstream, i.e. not aimed at the science fiction or fantasy market) short story propagandizing in favor of the much misunderstood Nisei, or American-born Japs. (Italicized phrases are quotes from Sturgeon, in this case from a letter writen to his mother on May 8, 1944.) This story immediately went to a new agent, Nannine Joseph, who was unable to sell it; the manuscript does not survive among Sturgeon’s papers.
The first week of May, 1944, while still completing “the Nisei story,” [a mainstream story written in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands] TS began “Killdozer!”, which he wrote in nine days and immediately sent to [John Campbell]. From a letter to his mother, Christine Hamilton Sturgeon, July 8, 1944: “When we were right at the end of the rope, in comes a check and a letter from Jack Campbell. The check was a godsend, but the letter is something that I’ll treasure for the rest of my life. I must have sold him thirty-five or forty stories and never have I had such a missive from him. ‘I don’t know how I can place it or when I’ll be able to use it, but there, my friend, you have a hunk of story. I’m giving you our highest rate, which brings the check to $542.50. I’m glad you’re back in the field, and if you have any more with anything like this level of tenseness, send ’em along. I want ’em.’ ”
[ . . . ]
How Ted became a ’dozer driver (abbreviated from a conversation between TS and Paul Williams, December 6, 1975): “So while we were in Jamaica, along came December the 7th, and Pearl Harbor, and here we were at the hotel, ninety miles away from Kingston, with gasoline supplies cut off and no chance of getting any guests out there at all. The Americans started building a very large base at Fort Simonds, and we went down there and applied for jobs. I ended up on the Jamaican payroll, handling mess halls and barracks, and a food warehouse. And finally a man came along, clearing up ground around the housing area, and driving a bulldozer. And I fell in love with that machine. So he let me get up on it, and I learned an awful lot. Then I was transferred from quarters and barracks to a gasoline station. We serviced all kinds of equipment, and I got to know some of the American operators, and finally I got hired as a bulldozer operator. I was making more money than I’d ever seen in my life. Then when the base began to fold up, a guy came around recruiting for another job, in Puerto Rico at a place called Ensenada Honda, where they were building an enormous shipfitting plant, and a dry dock, and a landing field. And ultimately we moved over to St. Croix and I settled down to write.” Sturgeon worked in Puerto Rico as a bulldozer operator from August ’42 to December ’43, after which he worked for the Navy for a few months as a supply clerk and cost analyst. In April he and Dorothe and their two daughters moved to St. Croix.
[. . .]
In a letter to his father, Edward Waldo, Feb. 27, 1946, he further reported: “[. . .]the editor thought so well of it that he cancelled his production schedule and had it in print within weeks, as the lead novel in his magazine, with a cover illustration. (The original oil painting for that cover now hangs in my living room.) The magazine hit the stands just as I arrived back in the States, and apparently caused quite a stir in the science-fiction crowd.
[. . .]
Crown Publishing Co. released a new anthology of science-fiction last week. [The Best of Science Fiction.] A month ago, an advance copy was read by a science editor out in California who, on seeing KILLDOZER leading its section in the book, wrote me and asked me if I would take on this series of juveniles.” [. . .] And Crown has just sent me a check for $155 for the reprint rights! In other words, what seemed like a mere temporary alleviation of my circumstances down in St. Croix and nothing more, has proved to be the focal point of a whole series of fine breaks.”
The notes also include information about the 1974 TV movie made from the story, and details about a revised version of the story* used in a later Sturgeon collection Aliens 4:
Sept. 23, 1958, Sturgeon wrote his agent: I would like to correct galleys on the collection called KILLDOZER. One reason . . . has to do with the title story, which has been talked about for films ever since it was written. It is a World War II story and needn’t be; a very little invisible mending will take care of that. It also needs a touch here and there in characterization and dialogue—for example, Street & Smith’s editing “damn” into “care” every time they saw it, so that your bulldozer operators keep saying “I don’t give a care . . .” and one or two other small repairs.
So Sturgeon did rewrite the last eight paragraphs.
* The updated version of Killdozer! is unhelpfully listed as a separate story by ISFDB: Killdozer! (revised).
4. I found it difficult to rate Moore’s story: going in knowing it was a ‘classic’ left me a little underwhelmed; if I’d stumbled across it myself I’d probably have raved about it.
5. The ‘City’ series at ISFDB. Only the eighth and last story The Simple Way (Fantastic Adventures, January 1951) didn’t appear in Astounding.
6. ‘Gramp’ Stevens died in 1999, so City must take place before that; Huddling Place opens with Nelson Wester’s funeral, and the plate on his crypt reads “2034-2117”.
7. As well as Desertion being an anti-Galactic Empire story, it is another one which does not fit into the supposed human primacy/exceptionalism rule said to exist in Campbell’s Astounding.
8. If I hadn’t seen elsewhere mention of the reverse anagrams in Cartmill’s Deadline, I don’t think I’d have noticed.
9. A typical example of positive coverage of Cartmill’s story is Alva Rogers’ account in A Requiem for Astounding:
Perhaps the most sensational story of the year was “Deadline,” a novelette in the March issue by Cleve Cartmill. This story was not sensational literarily, but literally.
[. . .]
[It excited] certain persons in government circles into action with ludicrous results. Campbell has published his version of the affaire Deadline, and I think it might be interesting to hear Cartmill’s. In a personal latter, he had this to say:
.
“Deadline,” that stinker, came about when John Campbell or I suggested to one or the other that I do a yarn about an atomic bomb. I’m not sure we called it that in our correspondence—we were thinking in terms of U-235 and critical mass. Our correspondence took place in early August, 1943. My file shows that I mailed it to Astounding Sept. 8, received the check Sept. 20. John wasn’t too happy with the story, but he knew I was hungry.
He published it early in March, 1944 and a week or two later a Brooks-Brothered young man from Military Intelligence came to see me at my home in Manhattan Beach. We spent about five or six hours together, mostly in my answering questions. I had the file of Cartmill-Campbell correspondence about the story, and he borrowed this for copying. Upshot: I was in the clear, but violated personal security which every American should etc., etc., etc. Just how I violated any kind of security wasn’t clear then; all the facts contained in the story were matters of public record.
What they were afraid of was that I—or John—had had access one way or another to information supposedly confined to the Manhattan Project: The similarity of names: Manhattan—Manhattan Beach were purely coincidental and half a continent apart.
They also put John through the question mill. He told me at our first meeting—Westercon, LA—some fifteen years after that they had tried to extract a promise that he would publish nothing more concerning nuclear fission and he told them to go fly their atoms.
Well, the various stories released in later years had everything from the FBI to foreign spies in the act. But I saw of Mata Hari(s) neither hide nor hari, damnit. (November 19, 1961)
.
Campbell was immensely pleased by the furor the story created in Washington. It was proof positive that science fiction, particularly the Astounding brand, was important enough to warrant serious scrutiny by learned heads in the government, and by inference from this fact, by others in the scientific community. No longer did science fiction deal with childish and improbable Buck Rogers adventures, but dealt instead, in many instances, with serious scientific problems. And most fans felt pretty much the same pride in their favorite form of literature when the facts concerning “Deadline” and Astounding’s involvement with atomic bomb security became known. For a while it was a devastating weapon used in refuting any sneering aspersions cast at science fiction by its critics. p. 132-133
There is an extensive (and much less flattering) account of the incident in Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding (Harper-Collins, 2018). Here are a couple of extracts to give you an idea:
[Campbell] had long suspected that the government was working on an atomic bomb. His earliest stories in college had revolved around the discovery of nuclear power, but when the moment finally came, it found him on the outside looking in. If he had graduated from MIT a few years later, he might conceivably have been part of the effort, but instead, he was just an “organized fan.”
It led him to break his one rule. He had said that Astounding would refrain from publishing anything that might reveal secrets of national defense, and now he was deliberately printing a story with blatant parallels to the most important military project of all time. Campbell made no effort to clear it with the censors, as he had for similar works. It was an act of recklessness that exceeded anything that Hubbard ever did—but it was also the only bomb that he could detonate.
And its impact was felt at once. The Manhattan Project counted many science fiction fans among its workers, and word of the story rapidly spread, until employees were talking about it openly in the cafeteria of the atomic weapons lab in New Mexico. Cartmill’s device bore minimal resemblance to the designs under development, but it didn’t matter. Edward Teller, who would later be known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, recalled that the reaction at Los Alamos was “astonishment.”
But it made its most significant impression on a man who wasn’t a scientist at all. He was a security officer. As the others discussed the story over lunch, he listened quietly—and he took notes. If Campbell had wanted attention, he was about to succeed beyond his wildest expectations.On March 8, 1944, a month after “Deadline” appeared, Agent Arthur E. Riley went to interview Campbell at the Chanin Building at 122 East Forty-Second Street, where the magazine had recently relocated. It was exactly the sort of reaction that the editor had hoped to provoke. The story wouldn’t have received nearly the same degree of interest if he had simply submitted it to the censorship office, and he seemed flattered by the inquiry, answering the agent’s questions as cheerfully as if he were auditioning for a role on the Manhattan Project itself.
Campbell took full responsibility, saying that he had written to Cartmill—who had “no technical knowledge whatever”—with the idea. Riley wrote in his report, “The subject of atomic disintegration was not novel to [Campbell], since he had pursued a course in atomic physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1933.” As an editor with a scientifically literate audience, Campbell added, he often drew on published sources and the work of his “technically minded intimates and associates.” He showed Riley a copy of a journal that talked about nuclear fission, and he even described the story line of “Solution Unsatisfactory.”
If he was hoping to make a favorable impression, he wasn’t entirely successful. Riley reported that Campbell was “somewhat of an egotist,” a judgment confirmed when the editor stated grandly, but not inaccurately, “I am Astounding Science Fiction.” Campbell also provided Cartmill’s address and offered to suppress the magazine’s Swedish edition, which seemed the one most likely to fall into German hands—and in fact, Wernher von Braun, the head of the Nazi rocket program, was allegedly obtaining it using a false name and a mail drop in Sweden, although there was no way that either man could have known this at the time.
These extracts come from the last part of Chapter Eight and the beginning of Chapter Nine
10. The Arena episode of Star Trek was written before the discovery of Brown’s story—probably why it is so naff. The Wikipedia page for that episode is here.
11. If you want a better idea of how this book measures up against what I might pick for a 1944 ‘Year’s Best’, look at the table below.
The first to fourth column give the story titles, authors, lengths (L) and place of publication (P), see below the table for the abbreviation legend.
The ‘G’ column lists Asimov and Greenberg’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘H’ column shows the story’s 1944 Retro Hugo award placing (not yet awarded).
The ‘C’ column shows how many of the anthologies and/or polls used in the Classics of Science Fiction list included the story in their collections (note that this list is SF only and skews against fantasy)—minus the anthology or award citations which have their own column (e.g., Greenberg/Asimov in this case).
The ‘O’ column shows inclusions in other major anthologies which are not on the Classic of SF list. These are worked out by me (usually to include Fantasy Retrospectives that CoSF don’t include) and I have not yet looked into this for some/all of the stories.
The ‘S’ column shows my likely choices for a ‘Best of the Year’ with an ‘x’. A dash means read but not included. Blank means unread.
The ‘T’ column shows the total points that each story gets (they get a point for being in each column and for each of the CoSF and other anthology inclusions).
The table is initially sorted so the stories with the highest total are at the top. A good way to efficiently read the year’s short fiction may be to start at the top and work down until you get to the end of the 2-point stories, but bear in mind this is all statistically invalid. Enjoy (and if you want to find copies of the stories online, and/or read more of the fiction of 1944, use the table on the 1945 Retro Hugo page).
Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1944
| Title | Author | L | P | G | H | C | O | S | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Far Centaurus | A. E. van Vogt | ss | AST, Jan | x | - | 1 | |||
| Deadline | Cleve Cartmill | nv | AST, Mar | x | 2 | - | 2 | ||
| The Veil of Astellar | Leigh Brackett | nv | TWS, Spr | x | x | 2 | |||
| Sanity | Fritz Leiber | ss | AST, Apr | x | 2 | - | 3 | ||
| Invariant | John R. Pierce | ss | AST, Apr | x | - | 1 | |||
| City | Clifford D. Simak | nv | AST, May | x | 1 | - | 2 | ||
| Arena | Fredric Brown | nv | AST, Jun | x | 10 | x | 12 | ||
| Huddling Place | Clifford D. Simak | ss | AST, Jul | x | 3 | - | 4 | ||
| Kindness | Lester del Rey | ss | AST, Oct | x | 1 | - | 2 | ||
| Desertion | Clifford D. Simak | ss | AST, Nov | x | 9 | x | 11 | ||
| When the Bough Breaks | Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore | nv | AST, Nov | x | x | 2 | |||
| When the Bough Breaks | C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner | nv | AST, Nov | x | x | 2 | |||
| Killdozer! | Theodore Sturgeon | na | AST, Dec | x | 3 | x | 5 | ||
| No Woman Born | C. L. Moore | na | AST, Dec | x | 6 | x | 8 | ||
| As Never Was | P. Schuyler Miller | ss | AST, Jan | 2 | - | 2 | |||
| The Children's Hour | Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore | nv | AST, Mar | 2 | x | 3 | |||
| The Children's Hour | Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore | nv | AST, Mar | 2 | x | 3 | |||
| Environment | Chester S. Geier | ss | AST, May | 2 | - | 2 | |||
| And the Gods Laughed | Fredric Brown | ss | PLA, Spr | 1 | 1 | ||||
| Culture | Jerry Shelton | ss | AST, Sep | 1 | 1 | ||||
| Juggernaut | A. E. van Vogt | ss | AST, Aug | 1 | 1 | ||||
| Lobby | Clifford D. Simak | ss | AST, Aug | 1 | 1 | ||||
| Plague | Murray Leinster | nv | AST, Feb | 1 | - | 1 | |||
| Tricky Tonnage | Malcolm Jameson | ss | AST, Dec | 1 | 1 | ||||
| Ogre | Clifford D. Simak | nv | AST, Jan | x | 1 | ||||
| Census | Clifford D. Simak | nv | AST, Sep | x | 1 | ||||
| Title | Author | L | P | G | H | C | O | S | T |
na=novella, nv=novelet, ss=short story
AST=Astounding; PLA=Planet Stories, TWS=Thrilling Wonder Stories. ●
