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"A novel of alien Earth"
Elspeth and Juana, cover by Earle Bergey
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Here in May 2021 I've been reading all of the speculative fiction stories that were published by
Jack Vance in
1951. Along the way, I've been allowing myself to be distracted by other things that I find in the old Sci Fi magazines such as
Startling Stories. In the
September 1951 issue, I read both Vance's short "The Masquerade on Dicantropus" and the longer lead story "House of Many Worlds" by
Sam Merwin.
Magic Crystals. I've complained about some of Vance's stories such as "Temple of Han" in which Vance inserted fantasy elements including the "god" Han. As a science fiction fan, I'd prefer having a "god" like Han converted into a space alien with advanced technologies at his disposal. Another complaint I have about many old Sci Fi stories is that they did not include any female characters. Future settings with space travel were often depicted as a men-only domain. At this point in my 1951 travels, I've also had my fill of magic crystals like the ones in "Temple of Han".
"The Masquerade on Dicantropus" includes Barbara, but almost at once upon starting to read this story I begin to regret wishing for a female character to flow from Vance's imagination through his pen and onto paper. There's Barbara in the image shown to the left on this page. Does she just stand around while her husband has fist fights with aliens?
Barbara's husband is Jim Root and it is hard to root for either Jim or Barbara. Vance makes no effort to make either character seem interesting or the kind of person a story reader would want to spend time with. Nor does Vance explain why Barbara is living on a distant exoplanet when all she does is complain that she wants to go back to Earth.
What about other stories that were being published as "speculative fiction" in the early 1950s... did they have more interesting roles for female characters?
Earlier this year I read the parallel world/
alternate history stories of John Laumer and so it was interesting to read "
House of Many Worlds" by Sam Merwin, Jr. It would not surprise me at all if Laumer was inspired to write his own alternate worlds Imperium stories after having read "House of Many Worlds".
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interior art by Virgil Finlay
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The main character in "House of Many Worlds" is "Elly" Elspeth Marinner, a poet who frequently slips into her private world of poetry, particularly when she finds herself in dingy settings as part of her job working for
Picture Week magazine. Her boss (
Orrin Lewis) sent Elspeth on assignment to the Carolina coast with a photographer, Mack Fraser. In addition to Earle Bergey's portrait of Elspeth (the blonde) on the cover of the
September 1951 issue of
Startling Stories, (top image, right for this blog post), there is additional internal art by Virgil Finley (see the image to the left on this page). Both the art work of Bergey and that of Finley are tightly focused like laser beams on the two beautiful women who grace the story.
The story begins like an episode of
The X-Files with
Fox Mack questioning a heavy-drinking fisherman about strange lights and even stranger
darkness along the Carolina coast. Elspeth is disgusted by the grungy bar they are in and begins constructing a poem about dead flies stuck to flypaper hanging from the ceiling in the bar. Eventually the fisherman takes Elspeth and Mack out to the mysterious Horelle Mansion located on Spindrift Key because "
that's where things happen".
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| interior art by Virgil Finlay |
On the third page of the story we get the portrait of Juana that is shown in the image to the left on this page. Sadly, we don't actually get to meet Juana until ten pages into the story. Juana invites Elspeth and Mack to come inside Horelle's mansion and she already knows their names and who they are. Horelle explains that Spindrift Key is a "tangential point" in the space-time continuum, a place where it is possible to cross over between different versions of Earth, each with its own unique historical timeline. Horelle is a "Watcher", one of the people who tries to help guide and improve human civilization on the various versions of Earth. "Watcher" is a euphemism because the Watchers can't resist meddling in the history of each world. Horelle wants to use Elspeth and Mack as agents to carry out a mission on a version of Earth that is nearing a critical point in time at which a devastating new war might begin.
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More Juana: eye candy art by Virgil Finlay |
The rather slow start to "House of Many Worlds" (with Mack and Elly bumbling around for days at the Carolina coast in search of a good story for
Picture Week magazine) makes no sense. Later we learn that the boss of Elspeth and Mack at
Picture Week magazine is also a "Watcher" and
Orrin Lewis supposedly sent them to the Carolina coast specifically to help Mr. Horelle deal with an emergency. However, Elspeth and Mack first spend several days aimlessly wandering around before finding the drunken fisherman who finally tells them about strange events on Spindrift Key.
The scene depicted in the image to the right does not happen until page 68 of the story, but the image was moved up to page 5. Editorial decision: maybe if readers are given a glimpse of Juana's breasts they won't ask any questions about plot holes.
Cosmic Portals. Soon after reaching Spindrift Key, there is a scene where Elspeth looks up at the stars. She and Mack have just passed through some sort of mysterious portal linking their version of Earth to another parallel version of Earth. While passing through the portal they were briefly in complete darkness, but now the stars are back and Elspeth muses: "the neatly spaced jewels in Orion's belt had not slipped a notch".
The mysterious Mr. Horelle is described as being very old and having a strange alabaster appearance and for a brief time Merwin allows readers to imagine that Horelle might have telepathic powers. I got my hopes up and began expecting to learn that Horelle was a space alien or a human-alien hybrid, but no. 😞
In "House of Many Worlds" there is no advanced alien technology needed to move between the many parallel versions of Earth; you just walk on over. During the course of the story we learn that there are many places on Earth where portals to alternate universes exist. Merwin's readers might wonder why they have never heard of these portals before, but this is not really a science fiction story, so don't expect logic or explanations of the magic tricks that Merwin includes in the story.
No Aliens Needed. Merwin had no need to include space aliens in "House of Many Worlds". For Merwin, it was enough to include characters from various versions of Earth who appear magically and are driven by inexplicable motives that allow them to create challenges for Mack and Elspeth to overcome. If I had my way, meeting alien visitors to Earth who had advanced technologies would have been an issue taken up in a sequel to "House of Many Worlds". However, for his sequel story ( "
Three Faces of Time"; first published as "
Journey to Misenum"), Merwin decided to go in the other direction, into the past, with a story set in a version of ancient Rome. Maybe the choice of a story about Rome was made simply in order to allow Elspeth to muse about the similarities between Mack's libido and a fiery volcano (
Mount Vesuvius).
Small World, Fast Girl. Juana is a fast girl. A few hours after meeting Mack, they become lovers. Even more impressive, Elspeth and Mack spend a week driving and flying from the Carolina coast through New Orleans to Oklahoma (they are in a big hurry and trying to arrive before war breaks out, or worse), and when they get to their destination, there is good old Juana, working as the secretary to the man (Reed Weston) who Elspeth and Mack have come to see in Oklahoma.
Elspeth and Mack learn that Weston has invented atomic rocket fuel, built a spaceship and is ready to head for Mars (which, we are assured by Sam Merwin, is a habitable planet).
What, you might ask, could possibly be worse than a war? Answer: Reed Weston going off to colonize Mars rather than stay on Earth and fix Earth's problems.
The dangers of being female in 1951 Sci Fi. In addition to atomic-powered spaceships, the story includes ray guns (disintegrators), magic toothpaste that prevents cavities as well as rocket-powered tanks, ocean liners and trains. 🚀 Elspeth and Mack come from a version of Earth where flying cars are in use.
Besides being a really cute girl who can flash her pretty breasts and entertain Mack during much of the story, what exactly is Juana's role in the plot? Sadly, the curvaceous Juana is simply the redshirt who gets disintegrated, dramatically ending her love affair with Mack. Juana's death opens a path to the end of the story where Elspeth's poetic heart is starting to soften and she is well on her way to falling in love with the crude and bent-nosed ex-boxer, Mack. Que violins. But don't expect to find Mack and Elly together in bed just yet... this is like The X-Files with many years of building sexual tension to be endured.
Two hot female characters... who could ask for more? As a science fiction fan, I want more than just curvaceous eye candy in a story. Sam Merwin plays quick and loose with technology. Reed Weston's version of Earth has disintegrators and spaceships, but they don't have any airplanes. Within weeks of seeing Mack's aircar, Weston's rebel forces (while on the run from government forces) are manufacturing their own aircars. The whole story is about schemes by the Watchers aimed at solving problems on the different versions of Earth by transfers of technology, yet none of the Watcher agents (nor the author of the story, Merwin) seems to know anything about science, technology or engineering. Eventually, with Merwin finally realizing how absurd this is, late in the adventure readers are told that in addition to being an ex-boxer, Mack is also an engineer. When this odd claim suddenly pops up, it seems as crazy as
claims within Sci Fi circles that
Ron Hubbard was an engineer.
While reading "House of Many Worlds" I could not stop thinking about both
The X-Files and Clifford D. Simak's story "
The Big Front Yard". Particularly when a big beautiful spaceship magically appears in Oklahoma, I was expecting Merwin to introduce us to some space aliens. But no. I read "The Big Front Yard" when it was re-published in
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume IIB. In Simak's story, a "Yankee trader" with no technical training becomes the man who will carry out Earth's technology exchanges with aliens. In his story, Simak pretended that Earth had marvelous technologies to trade (such as paint) because the technologically-advanced aliens never thought to invent paint. It would not surprise me to learn that Simak got his idea for "The Big Front Yard" from having read Mirwin's "House of Many Worlds".
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brief mention of dianetics in 1951
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Can't escape the Dianetics craze. In that
September 1951 issue of
Startling Stories there was an editorial with a seemingly random mention of
Dianetics. One year later, in the
September 1952 issue, Mines made space for a short article about Dianetics, a review by
James Blish of
A Doctor's Report on Dianetics.
Vance and Luck. Vance never had any trouble
killing off his characters, so I was expecting Barbara to meet a bad end in "The Masquerade on Dicantropus", much in the same way that Juana was disintegrated by Merwin. Another common feature in Vance's stories is the amazingly good luck of protagonists. For example, in
The Killing Machine, while
Gersen is trapped at
Interchange he miraculously opens up an old magazine that has a story about a retired banking executive. Reading that magazine story provides Gersen with the information that he needs to liberate himself from Interchange and while he is at it, also steal a vast fortune from his arch-enemy.
In "The Masquerade on Dicantropus" (that's
dessicated deserted inhospitable Dicantropus to you, dear reader), Jim seems close to loosing his wife to another man, but then the tide of fortune suddenly shifts and he finds himself the owner of a rich
diamond mine. After what Jim has been through with his wife, I think most men would be ready to ditch the complaining, two-timing Barbara, but at the end of the story Jim and Barbara seem to be on their way to a happy future. And once more, Vance had made crystals (in this case, diamonds) central to another story.
In search of Interesting Space Aliens. I'm always searching for stories about interesting aliens. How do the alien creatures in "The Masquerade on Dicantropus" hold up?
In "
Winner Lose All", Vance had the audacity to casually immerse readers in the cosmic coincidence of
three different types of alien creatures arriving at the same time on one particular dismal world of the vast galaxy. For "The Masquerade on Dicantropus", Vance only depicts two such planet-hopping visitors on Dicantropus. There are the Earthlings Jim and Barbara (stationed on the otherwise uninhabited Dicantropus, we are told, because Jim mans an interstellar communications relay station), but there are also alien creatures that Vance introduces to readers with a description that makes one think that they are natives of the planet living in burrows, rather like groundhogs. Exactly why Jim is stationed at the relay station, we never learn. I guess in Vance's imagined future you can't automate a telecommunications network.
Eventually, the alien masquerade ends. It is revealed that the aliens have a spaceship, although they only want the humans to leave them alone. At the end of the story, the alien spaceship rises from its underground hiding place and departs from Dicantropus, revealing that it was sitting on top of a rich source of diamonds, which Jim stakes a claim to. Exactly what the aliens were doing on Dicantropus and where they might go next is not explained, so I can't really say that they constitute an example of "interesting aliens". Vance suggests that left to himself, Jim never would have figured out that the alien spaceship was there, hidden underground. So, is Barbara, even with all of her complaining, actually a good luck charm?
While exploring the art work of
Peter Poulton,
I returned to the
November 1950 issue of
Startling Stories that has Vance's story "
The Five Gold Bands" and "Love My Robot" by
Roger Graham. I'm not happy with the basic premise of "Love My Robot": the idea that a factory can manufacture robots with an IQ of 600. The story is set some time after the year 2247, so who am I to say what will be state-of-the-art for robots in that future time? However, we are asked to believe that all of Humanity lives in fear that super-intelligent robots will take over the world and eliminate humans. But at the same time, super-intelligent robots with an IQ of 600 are used for various jobs around the Solar System. The "new" problem is that one I.Q. 600 robot has been mixed in with a batch of IQ 75 robots and nobody can identify that "lost" super-intelligent robot. The robot factory director (Chadwick Wright) wants to destroy the "lost" super-robot, and if it can't be identified, the entire batch of robots that it is hiding among will have to be destroyed.
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"Little Lost Robot" 1962
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Reaching this point in the story, I was feeling like "Love My Robot" was just some sort of rip-off of Asimov's 1947 story "
Little Lost Robot". In "Love My Robot", rather than have
Susan Calvin show up and find the lost robot, we have Ken Ranard,
D.Ps. ("
the greatest behavior specialist in the country") on the job. Ken meets Jane Weaver, an instructor at the robot factory who has been training and socializing a batch of new IQ 75 servant robots prior to their being sent out to work for customers. Hiding among Jane's students is the "lost" super-intelligent IQ 600 robot.
Readers are expected to believe that the IQ 600 robot (we eventually learn that his name is Walter) is able to think circles around humans and so it has figured out how to avoid being found and destroyed by Wright. The "lost" super-robot, Walter, decides that it will allow itself to be found by Ken under conditions that will allow it to survive and not be destroyed. First, Walter quietly hides among the batch of IQ 75 servant robots, frustrating Wright's efforts to find the "missing" robot. Second, for the past six months while in "school" with Jane, Walter has been quietly revealing to her his great love for poetry. Jane is totally charmed by Walter and won't turn him in.
Ken wants to do his job and find the missing robot, but after meeting the cute Miss Weaver (Ken can't help noticing that she has a figure like Miss America), he also wants to "get the girl". Killing two birds with one stone, Ken devises a test that allows him to identify Walter as the missing robot but also avoid the bot's destruction.
Ken arranges for Wright to destroy one of the IQ 75 robots under conditions that allow Wright to believe that the dangerous super-robot was destroyed and his problem has been solved.
However, while collecting his fee for finding the lost robot, Ken arranges to buy Walter and takes the super-intelligent robot home from the factory. When Jane realizes what Ken had done, she goes home with him too. What abut the danger to Humanity posed by Walter? All Walter cares about is poetry, so the human species is not actually in danger of being destroyed.
"Love My Robot" is silly and contrived, but if you can over-look the plot holes, it is a fun and twisted kind of love story and we humans can imagine that Walter paid for his freedom by craftily arranging for Ken and Jane to live happily after after.
Vance was developing his story writing skills while creating bits of fluff like "The Masquerade on Dicantropus" for the Sci Fi magazines of the 1950s. I much prefer Vance's later novels (such as
Trullion) over these short stories, but it is interesting to see Vance at work exploring plot twists that he will later use to better effect in his more mature works.
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more crystals
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Related Reading - other Vance stories from 1951:
Overlords of Maxus,
The New Prime,
The Ten Books,
Golden Girl,
Son of the Tree,
Temple of Han,
The Plagian Siphon,
Dover Spargill's Ghastly Floater,
Winner Lose All.
Next: Chapter 11 of Meet the Phari.
Also: even more magic crystals from Vance and continued exploration of Vance's early speculative fiction in August 2021.
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