Short People

in the Ekcolir Reality

I'll count this blog post as part of a series that includes "Short vs Long" from last year. During 2021, I've been continuing my project of reading short stories from the early days of science fiction publishing. Exploring the origins of Isaac Asimov's story ideas provides my main motivation for expeditions into the pages of early pulp magazines that were explicitly catering to science fiction fans. Asimov once wrote that he hoped nobody would ever try to find and list all of the old Sci Fi stories that provided him with plot elements for his own stories. I don't have the patience for such a conceptual archeology project, so I try to keep my reading of old stories quite selective and centered on my favorite topics such as time travel, robots and telepathy.

More Sci Fi Archeology; Jack Vance. I've also been comparing the short fiction of Jack Vance to his longer stories. Given my general preference for long-format stories, it will surprise nobody that I much prefer Vance's novels to his short stories. Vance transitioned gracefully from pulp-era short stories to novels, but I can't say the same for Asimov. 

in Galaxy, Feb. 1961

 Isaac Asimov. To his dying days I think Asimov was more comfortable and competent writing short stories. However, I've read almost all of Asimov's novels and I have no regrets about that. There are still many short stories by Asimov that I just have not gotten around to reading. Those unread Asimov stories are like an old friend who I can keep visiting again and again, each time discovering a new piece of Asimov's vast body of works. I have no hesitation is recommending Asimov's short story "Cal" as a fun introduction to his robot stories. I would hesitate to toss a new reader of Asimov's works into one of his long robot novels.

The Search for Creamed Shorts. I've read far more short science fiction stories from the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s than I've read from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and this millennium. I'm fascinated by the older science fiction stories and not a fan of newer stuff that might get labeled as "new wave" or "cyber punk". However, before I knew that printed science fiction existed, I was first exposed to science fiction in films and Star Trek.

The Uranium Age. I've previously blogged about the 1959 novel Level 7. A short blurb about Level 7 is shown to the left on this page. In case you are wondering, PBX officer X127 and his chums did not survive very many years in their underground city. They had a nuclear reactor for power and it malfunctioned. Nothing goes right for poor X127. After making the surface of Earth uninhabitable (the nuclear war depicted in Level 7 involves not only city-flattening H-bombs but also "dirty bombs" designed to widely spread highly radioactive dust over the entire planet) X127 is ready to find a girlfriend, make babies and propagate the human species into a distant future when the surface of the planet is once again habitable. 

bad taste: cream pie deleted scene from Dr. Strangelove

 Too Intense Reality. However, in the end, everyone in "Level 7" is killed by radiation from a nuclear reactor accident. Goodbye cruel world.

I'm surprised that Level 7 was never made into a movie or a television program. Instead we got films like Dr. Strangelove (1964). One of the great puzzles for me as a child growing up in the 1960s was that some movies were in color while others were black and white. I've seen the claim that one reason for making this particular movie on black and white film was so that viewers would have the feeling that they were watching a news program or a documentary. You know... the kind with a pie fight.

in the Ekcolir Reality

 Sci Fi and Black Humor. It is easy for me to view Level 7 as science fiction, given its extrapolation of nuclear weapons from where they were in the 1950s and on towards a future with increasingly destructive and suicidal atomic bombs and rocket-powered delivery systems. The fact that a peaceful power plant ends up killing X127 is an almost-humorous, sardonic twist. I've never been able to wrap my mind around the odd mixture of humor and horror in Dr. Strangelove. As originally conceived, the film was to end with a wild pie-trowing scene! In my own writing, I don't think I could ever find a way to mix a topic such as nuclear war with humor. Dr. Strangelove always makes me think of M*A*S*H.

I have a lot of fun imagining how the science fiction genre might have developed differently in an alternate Reality where women dominated science fiction early in the 20th century. Could there have been better female characters in the Ekcolir Reality than in our Reality?

cover art by Don Punchatz

 Female Characters. Here in our male-dominated Reality, I've long enjoy female characters such as Asimov's Susan Calvin, Noÿs Lambent and Bayta Darell and Jack Vance's Alice Wroke, Sessily Veder and Wayness Tamm, but what about female characters that were written by female authors? One of my favorites is the anthropologist Laarica Johns in Sydney Van Scyoc's novel Assignment Nor'Dyren. 

I've always imagined that it might be Bayta Darell there in the artwork for the cover of Foundation and Empire (image to the right) by Don Punchatz. Bayta was the hero who defeated the telepathic Mule when he was only moments away from learning the location of the Second Foundation, which would have lead to the mutant Mule destroying all of Seldon's plans for the Second Galactic Empire. But what about female characters in short science fiction stories, fictional women who flowed from the pen of female authors?

cold cream in the Ekcolir Reality

I'm amazed that anyone ever made a movie about nuclear war with a cream pie fight, but what about a science fiction story about cold cream? Look no further than "Birth of a Salesman" by Alice Sheldon, which was published in the March 1968 issue of Analog Science Fiction under the pen-name James Tiptree, Jr. However, I'm going to first discuss her second published story, "The Mother Ship" which has a more classical Sci Fi theme (First Contact with space aliens) and characters who work for the CIA. Alice worked in the Air Force then the CIA and earned a Ph.D. before publishing any of her science fiction stories.

the girls from Capella - Interior art by Joe Wehrle

I can't try to fathom a science fiction story about cold cream without also thinking about the 1958 film Indiscreet. Sadly, in our Reality, Ingrid Bergman did not get to meet any aliens... she had to content herself with Cary Grant. In the film, when she meets Grant, she is in the process of slathering her face with cold cream.

First Contact. Back in the 1970s, I read a strange type of First Contact story that was set in a far future time after the collapse of a great Galactic Empire. In that old story, a lonely space explorer makes contact with a "lost" planet with human residents, a world that has long been isolated. The humans of that planet have adapted to their world and have evolved to be very tall, but the space explorer does not realize this while communicating with the planet by videophone. 

excerpt from "The Mother Ship"

All the poor horny spaceman knows is that the woman he is talking to looks mighty cute. He arranges to land his spaceship on her planet and since he hopes to also also dock his penis with her vagina, he insists on meeting her in private at a remote location of her planet. Only when they are face-to-faceknee does he realize how much larger she is and how silly he would look hugging her knees. "The Mother Ship" is similar, except it is large women who arrive on Earth from the depths of space (Capella) and they can't resist grabbing each available opportunity to have sex with Earthmen.

"The Mother Ship" reminds me of John D. MacDonald's Sci Fi novel Wine of the Dreamers as originally published in the May 1950 issue of Startling Stories. I love stories about "ancient astronauts" who visited Earth long ago. In the case of "The Mother Ship", we are asked to believe that long ago, very tall female humanoids lived on an exoplanet of Capella and had a small problem: short mutant women who did not grow to be much taller than men. We are told that thousands of years ago, the Capellans exiled a bunch of their short women on Earth and that "explains" why CIA agent Tillie is the spitting image of the tall, sexy Capellans, as long as you ignore the fact that Tillie is only about half as tall as a typical Capellan woman.

Alice Sheldon's tutorial on rape.
excerpt from "The Mother Ship"

 Sex Slaves. In "The Mother Ship", Alice Sheldon tells us that The Capellan women keep their short men as sex slaves. Further, they now intend to start abducting human males from Earth and selling them as slaves on the Capellan home world. Alice hints in the story that Capellan women have vaginas that are rather like vacuum cleaners; that anatomical innovation along with their large size allows them to aggressively rape any man for their pleasure.

"The Mother Ship" is very contrived and Tillie's story arc is that before the arrival of the Capellans, she survived being brutally raped and left for dead. In the story, she plays the victim's role in a CIA film about an invading space alien raping the Capellan women. In the end, Tillie can now live happily with the narrator of the story, a man who got raped by the girls from Capella.

Figure 1. Interior art for "Birth of a Salesman" by Kelly Freas.

Got paint? Cover by Frank Kelly Freas

On a brighter note, I'll now describe "Birth of a Salesman", Alice Sheldon's short story about selling cold cream to aliens. While reading "Birth of a Salesman" I could not help but think of "The Big Front Yard". Simak's story was irritating because it seemed to suggest that one man would control all trade with the aliens. Similarly, "Birth of a Salesman" is irritating because the over-worked and always short-on-time Mr. Benedict of Xeno-Cultural Gestalt Clearance is depicted as having to deal with every aspect of galactic trade shipments.

It is just another typical day in the department of Xeno-Cultural Gestalt Clearance (XCGC) when in walks Miss Krupp, a tall gazelle-like woman, who runs Joanna Lovebody, Inc., which produces the fragrant Joanna Lovebody Cremes. Miss Krupp wants to start shipping her product to planet Sirloin Twelve where the aliens use Joanna Lovebody Creme as cooking oil. 

in the Ekcolir Reality

As shown in Figure 1, above, all new shipments of Earthly products that are destined for distant exoplanets must be carefully checked in order to be sure that they will cause no harm to sensitive aliens. The Joanna Lovebody Creme is cleared for shipment as long as it is in stink-proof packages. Somehow the crack team of analysts at XCGC failed to notice that bottles of Joanna Lovebody Creme play music when opened and now galactic civilization is at risk of being disrupted...

Science Fact. The ISFDB lists the full name of John Campbell's Analog magazine as Analog Science Fiction -> Science Fact. In the March 1968 issue was an editorial by Campbell in which he excitedly proclaimed that dowsing "works" and that there would for the first time now be serious research into the phenomenon.

What had Campbell so excited was that in the middle of the Vietnam war, a few Marines were experimenting with dowsing as a means of detecting hidden enemy tunnels. In Campbell's mind, this equated to legitimizing dowsing, which would open the flood gates for scientific investigation of the phenomenon.

A new industry for plant emotions!
or, what will vegetarians eat now?

 Plant People. I'll also mention in passing that "Christopher Bird", like Alice Sheldon, was supposedly at one time associated with the CIA and also interested in fantasy. Along with an interest in dowsing, "Bird" helped write The Secret Life of Plants. I've previously commented on the strange popularity of science fiction stories about plant people (also see Asimov's "Each an Explorer"). Also, Jack Vance included dowsing in one of his stories: see "Parapsyche".

I wonder if it was painful for science fiction enthusiasts like Isaac Asimov to watch the proliferation of pseudoscience in American pop culture while subscriptions to Sci Fi magazines declined. Asimov liked to imagine that if enough people read science fiction then our society might be able to deal with changes arising from new technologies.

interior art for "The Fall of Mercury" by Leo Morey

One of the female writers of science fiction that Asimov read as a boy was Leslie F. Stone. I've complained about Sci Fi story tellers who populated every planet in our Solar System with intelligent natives. Some of the old stories about life on Mercury really pushed the limits of fantasy biology. 

In the December 1935 issue of Amazing Stories was "The Fall of Mercury" by Leslie F. Stone. How does "The Fall of Mercury" compare to other old science fiction stories about life on Mercury?

"the Whirlpool was not stationary"

"The Fall of Mercury" takes place in the setting of a Federation of Planets at a time when human space explorers have visited planets such as Venus, but everyone believes it would be a waste of time to explore Mercury. When our intrepid heroes Bruce and Mort set off from New York on a mission to Mercury they are warned to not fall into the mysterious Venerian Whirlpool. The Spacial Bureau on Venus constantly monitors that mysterious "whirlpool" or "spot" in space and warns spacecraft to stay clear. 

dangers to shipping: whirlpools and monsters

However, nobody in the Federation seems particularly surprised to have the Venerian Whirlpool shifting its position around, mostly inside the orbit of Venus but occasionally going closer to Earth Tellus than Venus. The Whirlpool can also suddenly change its size. In the imagined future of "The Fall of Mercury", the Venerian Whirlpool is just one of the risks to interplanetary shipping that merchants expect to occasionally lose a ship to.

alien contact (see)

We get a full page of dire warnings about the need to stay clear of the Whirlpool, but Bruce and Mort have cleverly decided to be the first humans to visit Mercury on a day when the Whirlpool is directly on the flight path from Earth Tellus to Mercury. Steering clear of the Whirlpool would lengthen their trip by a few hours (they have atomic motors), so as seems inevitable, Bruce and Mort and their spaceship, Victory, are caught in the Whirlpool and exclamation points begin to fly through "The Fall of Mercury" like flashing comets and meteors. 

Yes, dear reader, this is such a dangerous situation that Mort complains when his coffee spills due to Victory being buffeted by the Whirlpool. But then they are mysteriously extricated from the deadly Whirlpool and some external force carries them the rest of the way to Mercury. Fhew! 😥

the Venerian Water-flask

Arriving at Mercury, our explorers detect chlorine in the greenish-yellow atmosphere. This attracts little attention from Bruce since it is well know that "Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune all possessed an undue amount of chlorine". On the surface of Mercury there is a heap of debris and a lovely Venerian Water-flask. Since astronomers could see that Venus was covered by clouds, it had become popular in fiction to imagine oceans and jungles on Venus... not to mention native humanoids. Had explorers from Venus already reached Mercury?

in the Ekcolir Reality
original cover art by Leo Morey

The Raxgeu of Raxge. Soon the Victory is pulled inside an underground cavern my a force beam and put into storage along with a bunch of other spacecraft from various planets (and the asteroid Ceres, where the natives are only 3 feet tall). One of these is the pleasure yacht of Tica Burno, reported missing one month previously. Now we are treated to the scene on the cover of the December 1935 issue of Amazing Stories as Bruce and Mort are carried down deeper into the inner world of Mercury, which is called "Raxge" by the pale, four-armed Raxgau, each less than one foot tall, who live inside Mercury (Raxge). After Bruce and Mort are informed that they are now the property of the Raxgau, Bruce and Mort are thrown into a chamber with the other captives from various worlds of the Federation. 

I can't help imagining how "The Fall of Mercury" might have been written in the Ekcolir Reality. Bruce and Mort don't have a fist fight with their Evil Alien™ captors and these explorers from Earth Tellus could have been written as female characters. But no 😔

Solar System 101 info dump

Luckily, Earth Tellus, Mars, all the many inhabited asteroids, the moons of Saturn and Jupiter as well as Venus have essentially the same kinds of oxygen-rich, chlorine-free atmospheres. Among the prisoners, Bruce finds his Venerian friend Burno who along with the other captives have been subjected laboratory experiments, interrogations and bodily probings by the Raxgau.

A coal-black Raxtau (named Chen-Chak) from Saturn (which the Raxtau call "Raxta"), 15 feet tall and with four arms, arrives among the prisoners. In the dark, Chen-Chak glows with a strange blue light and soon it becomes apparent that he needs light to survive.

Lola-Lyly. image source

It is real relief when Chen-Chak shows up on inside Mercury Raxge, because he can finally explain the backstory for "The Fall of Mercury". Long ago, the star Rax passed through the Solar System. Both Raxta and Raxge originated in the Rax star system and both the Raxtau and Raxgau originated on the planet Raxta, but after long and destructive wars, the Raxgau went to live on the planet Raxge. Got that?

Through the ages, the Raxtau re-configured their bodies, becoming artificial lifeforms that were able to obtain everything they need to survive from light. In the process of ridding themselves from a need for food, water or air to breath, they also adopted a very cold body temperature... now the Raxtau can survive in the cold of space.

in the Ekcolir Reality

When Rax (an old, dying star) passed through the Solar System, Raxta became the planet that Earthlings call Saturn and Raxge became Mercury, now both in orbit around the Sun (Sol). Rax fragmented and formed the planets Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus. Also at this time, a planet orbiting the Sun was shattered, forming the asteroid belt. 

This all happened before humans evolved on Earth Tellus. The Raxgau moved underground and altered their bodies, shrinking themselves down to a height of less than one foot. But now, the interior of Mercury Raxge is full of Raxgau and they are ready to attack the Federation and take control of the Federation planets.

Super Hi Tek™

I like the very ancient aliens of "The Fall of Mercury", but the good Raxtau vs evil Raxgau theme seems lame. Chen-Chak has a device that he can use to send objects (including pesky Raxgau) into the future. Both the Raxtau and the Raxgau have sophisticated technologies for controlling gravity and they have telepathic powers. In the end, Chen-Chak sends Mercury Raxge sinking into the fiery interior of the Sun, putting an end to the Evil Alien™ Raxgau.

in the Ekcolir Reality

 The No Females Zone. Beyond the genocide in "The Fall of Mercury", we are left with this chilling warming news: when Mercury Raxge was dropped into the Sun by Chen-Chak, the rest of the Solar System was perturbed and Earth Tellus moved 14,000,000 miles closer to the Sun. Readers are told that this will have benefits for Earth, but we would now seem to be in need of a sequel to "The Fall of Mercury" in which Chen-Chak drops by Earth Tellus to help deal with the global warming problem. 

in the Ekcolir Reality

Maybe in the Ekcolir Reality such a sequel got published and Chen-Chak visited Earth Tellus along with a female Raxtau named Lola-Lyly. And maybe in such a sequel it could be revealed that some of the poor Raxgau were sent to Neptune rather than be exterminated. (I prefer happy endings)

Related Reading: "The Watery Place". A short joke story by Isaac Asimov in which well-dressed aliens from Venus visit Earth (First Contact) and describe their world as "the watery place". An Earthling thinks the alien says "Venice", not "Venus" and hilarity ensues.

Also: "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain" by James Tiptree, Jr.

Next: time loop fiction

Anti-gravity book. AI-generated image.