"MacHinery" by Eric Frank Russell
We've hit our first mine. "MacHinery" is a long and tedious joke story about an obese robot. Thumbs down!
Automechanisms Incorporated has spent four years designing and building a prototype robot that looks just like a human being. They had to stuff so many electronics into this machine that they had no choice but to construct it in the form of a fat guy, despite the fact that of course if you'd had your druthers your first robot would look like Buster Crabbe or Sophia Loren. This robot can talk and read like a lot of people you know, but also like a lot of people you know it can't accomplish any productive tasks like build cars or fight zombies or anything like that. This robot is expected to contribute to Automechanisms Inc.'s bottom line as a sales assistant and sample; it will accompany the salesmen who travel the nation selling AI's products and serve as an irrefutable example of AI's ingenuity.
We follow the salesman whose territory includes New York, as he goes on a trip to the Big Apple with the robot in tow. Most of the text of "MacHinery" consists of an authority figure yelling at Ackroyd because the robot has caused a minor disturbance of the peace. There are also jokes about how the robot doesn't know slang or comprehend metaphor, and initially doesn't realize people lie and break the rules.
On the train to the city so nice they named it twice (but not too nice to send me packing 😞) the robot reads magazines, and, well, wouldn't you know it, when it enjoys a story this generates heat inside its circuits, causing a noxious smell as its insulation smolder, causing the conductor of the train to yell at Ackroyd. On the streets of Manhattan the robot hypnotically projects outlandish images from a children's book it read recently, such as the image of a hippo wearing tights; the police yell at Ackroyd because they think he stole the hippo from the zoo.
A waste of time that has never escaped the confines of Thrilling Wonder Stories.
If you want to hear me complain some more about Russell, here are some links: Earlier this year we read Russell's novel The Mindwarpers (AKA What Strange Device); we've also read an entire Russell collection of stories about the crew of a space ship that some have proclaimed a classic and which the MPorcius staff considers overrated. In 2016 I read The Best of Eric Frank Russell and wrote four blog posts about its thirteen stories, some of which I awarded a passing grade.
"The New Reality" by Charles L. Harness
"The New Reality" is based on the philosophical question of to what extent our beliefs about the world reflect our perception of reality, and to what extent our expectations of reality create that reality. People in the distant past believed the Earth was flat--could it be that it truly was flat, and became round when people started believing it to be round?
It is the future! Adam Prentiss is head of head of the Eastern division of the secret police Bureau that keeps an eye on scientists to make sure they don't make any civilization-threatening discoveries or invent any world-threatening devices. We observe as he spies on a scientist, Luce, even sneaking into his lab at night to photograph his notes and apparatus. Prentiss, an expert on ontology and author of the suppressed doctoral dissertation "Involuntary Confirmation of Incoming Sensoria Apperception Mass," becomes convinced that Luce, by use of his apparatus, the world's smoothest Nicol prism mounted on a goniometer, can "blow physical laws straight to smithereens." Prentiss confronts Luce; Luce invites Prentiss to join him on his grand quest to "know all things" and become a god. Prentiss tries to shoot Luce down, but Luce has his forcefield ready and escapes.
Prentiss has a meeting with the head of the secret police, a beautiful woman known as "E," and her staff. E acts like you expect a secret police woman to act, trying to do stuff behind Congress's back, and her staff includes a dude named Speer and a dude named Goring, as if Harness is trying to remind us of the Third Reich. (Harness picked Prentiss's, E's and Luce's names so carefully it is hard to believe he just chose Speer and Goring at random.) These Feds have a debate of several pages on the nature of reality; Prentiss, based on the research he has done connected to his investigation of Luce, insisting that the nature of the universe is the product of the imagination of humankind and has been changing--becoming more complex--as people have become more sophisticated and expected to discover greater complexity in the world around them. For example, in the time of ancient man there were only four elements--the periodic table of 92 elements was populated by the imagination of modern scientists. (Prentiss gives many more examples, dropping the names of many scientists. Harness proves he can drop the names of artists, as well as those of scientists, by telling us that E has a body like the Venus of Valasquez, a painting you can find on the ever-expanding list of art masterpieces that have fallen victim to terrorism.)
The secret police bigwigs vote to kill Luce at once without trial--Prentiss thinks the man could be running his final experiment, the experiment that will alter the universe in such a way it will kill almost everybody, in just a few hours. Prentiss's people quickly find Luce's fortified hideaway, and it is decided that Prentiss will go in commando-style; if Prentiss doesn't eliminate Luce before a set time, a tactical nuke will be dropped on the hideout. Prentiss fights his way past Luce's great cats, and is captured. We get some science lectures relating to photons--Luce is going to capture and destroy a photon, which he and Prentiss are sure will reset the universe to how it was before human imagination started altering it.
The device is activated just as the atomic bomb detonates, and the universe is reborn. Only three people are smart enough to survive the transition to the simple universe of only four elements and a flat Earth and all that: Adam Prentiss, E (the "E" stands for "Eve") and Luce, who is not a naked person like Adam and Eve, but a serpent!
Yes, "The New Reality," like A. E. van Vogt's 1948 "Ship of Darkness," is one of those stories the predictable surprise ending of which is that the main characters are Adam and Eve. This is sort of ridiculous, of course, but this story actually isn't bad. The style is fine, the plot holds together internally, and I have to admire the story's audacious ambition. The science and philosophy lectures are maybe too long, but they are sort of interesting. We'll call this one "OK," maybe not exactly "good," but better than "acceptable."
"The Spark" by Mack Reynolds
Reynolds had a strange and varied career, including a youth as a hardcore left-wing activist, expulsion from the radical political party to which he had devoted so much service, extensive world travel and lots of work as a travel writer for men's magazines, and, reportedly, great popularity as a SF writer even though his stories are not very good. The thing that differentiates Reynolds' SF stories from those of other writers--according to his admirers, at least--is that he speculates about political economy. "The Spark" has never been reprinted, but we won't let that stop us from probing it with our bayonets to see if it is one of the mines we fear or one of the treasures we covet.
The venerable civilization of Mars is in trouble! The red planet's natural resources are almost used up, and the population is down to like 500,000 people. The Martians have to emigrate to some other planet, but they haven't invented a stardrive yet, so the only place they can go is Earth. But they assume because Earth people are so violent, with endless conflict between race, nation, class, religion, etc., that we won't welcome them, but instead kill them.
The twist ending of the story is that the Martians have just enough material to make a single atomic bomb, and they plan to nuke an Earth city in hopes that it will cause a general nuclear war that will wipe out the human race, leaving this big blue marble uninhabited so the Martians can move in.
Banal filler, a total waste of time. Thumbs down!
"If You Don't Watch Out" by Frank Belknap Long
Frank Belknap Long has dumped many a load of junk on us over the years, but he is capable of good work; case in point: our recent find, "Fuzzy Head," which I was totally into. "Fuzzy Head" appeared in Thrilling Wonder, so maybe "If You Don't Watch Out" is going to be another Long winner!
Our tale is set in small town America, in the future of jet bikes and visiphones and pneumatic tubes that deliver food and consumer goods from Chicago to the grocer, from the grocer to you. Living in the town is the famous MacShane, retired space explorer, one of the first men to visit Mars, Venus, and Phobos. Why is MacShane when he isn't even forty yet? Why does MacShane live like a hermit, shunning human contact? The narrator, a boy in his early teens who idolizes MacShane and wants to follow in his footsteps, finds out!
To put it briefly, a series of propitious events leads to the young narrator paying an unexpected visit to the reclusive MacShane's isolated house, where he looks in through a window after hearing an eerie sound and seeing some queer lights. In a cage right there by MacShane's chair is a fearsome Martian monster! This beast from the red planet has psychic powers of a special nature--it can read your subconscious and see what your idea of the perfect mate is, and then project an illusion of that creature as a means of attracting you. In its native habitat it uses this ability to attract mates, but in a cage here in Podunk USA it keeps using its powers in an effort to draw MacShane close enough to the cage that it can reach out and devour him! Obviously, MacShane should just kill this thing, and he even has a ray pistol sitting right there on the table next to him with which to do the job, but he can't--he is addicted to the superrealistic vision of the perfect woman the monster regularly projects! It is this addiction that has turned him into a grim man who is unable to marry his childhood sweetheart.
Fiction is full of coincidences, and the one day that the narrator is there to witness MacShane struggle with his addiction is the very day MacShane steps too close to the cage and the monster seizes him and starts rending his Terran flesh with its Martian talons. The narrator hops inside, snatches the ray pistol, and kills the beast, saving MacShane's life and curing him of his addiction so he can marry his girl-next-door sweetheart.
If that sounds like a happy ending, don't be so sure! MacShane knows the narrator well enough to know he wants to become an interplanetary explorer and researcher on alien life forms, and he warns the kid not to go to Mars, thinking him a sensitive soul who would be easy prey for just the sort of monster who almost ruined MacShane's life. In a sort of epilogue we see that the narrator has ignored this advice and is on the red planet, his ray gun in his fist, searching for one of those monsters. Will the narrator fall prey to visions of his dream girl like his role model did? The ending is not clear, but we are given reason to fear the worst!
A good story that mixes C. L. Moore-style eroticized psychic battling with Ray Bradbury-type sappy kid-in-a-small-town goop. I don't know why this story has never been reprinted, seeing as Long is famous and there have been several Long collections printed since 1950. "If You Don't Watch Out" is a reminder that it is worthwhile for us fans of 20th-century science fiction and aficionados of the weird to explore these old magazines, even if the path may be littered with mines!
"Bluff Play" by Raymond Z. Gallun
It is the near future--1955! Our narrator is working at the secret installation where America's space fleet of twenty nuclear-powered warships is being constructed. Just weeks before the fleet will be ready for launch, American scientists and spies confirm that our worst fears have come true--the enemy (for some reason Gallun never specifies the identity of the enemy, but we have to assume it is the Soviet Union) have already launched their own space fleet! One of our spies sneaks over to the enemy space field in the Arctic Circle, and brings back a lump of mud from their landing zone--mud that must be from Venus!
The boffins and spooks live in fear that the enemy could blackmail us into submission or bomb us into oblivion at any moment, as there is no way to protect the West from attack from space. But they keep working on finishing up our space fleet so we will eventually be able to present a credible retaliatory threat. More bad news: evidence that there are foreign spies--cunningly insidious moles who are indistinguishable from loyal Americans--right here in the secret base!
While everybody else is scrambling to put the finishing touches on the USA's first space vessels, one guy on the base is doing pure science work on that lump of alien mud. The narrator is irritated that this guy is wasting his time on the quest for knowledge when at any moment everybody on the base could be nuked or marched off to the gulag! But it turns out that that that lump of Venusian goop is the key to saving the world from tyranny!
Ya see, the lump of mud contained spores, seeds and invertebrate eggs, and the scientist manages to grow, in a terrarium, a little collection of Venusian plants and bugs. The narrator is kept in the dark, but the security personnel at the base have managed to pin down the identity of the enemy spy in their midst. They let the mole film the terrarium and escape--the narrator actually tries to catch him and he has to be violently prevented from foiling his superiors' master plan. Knowledge of the existence of the terrarium of Venusian life makes the enemy rulers think that we Americans have also been to Venus and also have a space fleet, deterring them and giving us time to finish our fleet so that we have a real deterrent. Gallun ends the story on an even more hopeful note--the government of the enemy country is discredited and a revolt breaks out and we are lead to believe that the Cold War will soon be over and a peaceful Earth will soon be exploring the solar system.
Solid entertainment.
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Gallun and Long offer good stories, and Harness a decent one, so I won't complain over much about the annoying pieces from Reynolds and Russell--I only have myself to blame for reading their work, which I have so often been disappointed in in the past. When we remember that we enjoyed Brackett's story in this ish, we have to admit it is a good issue.
More Thrilling Wonder in the future, but we'll be taking a break from space travelers and scientists for a few days and reading some other genre fiction. Stay tuned to see what's up!
