August Derleth (editor) - Worlds of Tomorrow (1953)

It feels like it's been a long time since I read one of these collections and I warmed to this one quite quickly, enjoying the spirit of the enterprise even where a couple of the stories were underwhelming for one reason or another. The spirit of the enterprise was, in this instance, visions of tomorrow, I suppose - which was doomed to failure given science-fiction's somewhat shaky predictive track record; but at the heart of that spirit was the notion of there being a future as something exciting or at least vastly different to the present. I feel we've lost sight of this, so it's nice to be reminded.

Anyway, aside from a few clunkers reliant on twist endings which have since become massive clichés - and may even have been clichés in 1953 for all I know - the collection is mostly great, and actively astonishing in a couple of cases. Jogging straight past the first Earthman on Mars ending up in a Martian zoo, Frank Belknap Long's The Great Cold reminds us of the genre's roots in - or at least its passage through - weird fiction, taking us to a far future where super-evolved barnacles rule the Earth, which the author somehow manages to write as genuinely weird and upsetting rather than just plain screwy, additionally using his beautifully vivid prose to say something beyond weird innit! Somehow, there's a lesson for us even in this world of super-evolved barnacles.

It was an utterly malicious dream, evoked by enforced idleness, the product of immense power seeking to sate itself in trivial cruelties.

The Fires Within by Arthur C. Clarke is similarly fantastic, with weird physics performing the heavy lifting for what is essentially a conversation between a couple of eggheads at a research centre. Fritz Leiber, Mack Reynolds, and Simak collaborator, Carl Jacobi all turn in respectable pieces, but the finest are possibly the last two. The Martian and the Moron may be the best thing I've read by Theodore Sturgeon, and it could be significant that it contains no traditional elements of science-fiction, or at least, the detail upon which the story spins remains ambiguous, leaving us with a radio ham who may or may not have picked up an alien transmission, and his son's relationship with a person I won't describe here because, despite having read the story, I still can't work out what or who she's supposed to be. The Martian and the Moron puts the reader to work, but it feels worth the effort. Finally, William Tenn's Null-P serves up an unfortunately familiar future history of the United States with lashings of sardonic wit. Despite what I wrote in the first paragraph, this is one case of a prediction having been fired in the right direction even if he doesn't quite hit the bullseye. Tenn's future America is founded on a fear of book learnin' with stupidity reclassified as a mark of character. Tenn fails because, as an optimist, he didn't account for basic greed as a motivating factor, with lies and telling people what they want to hear as a means to this end; but it's a wonderful piece of writing, alternately chilling and funny without resorting to slapstick.

August Derleth (editor) - The Other Side of the Moon (1948)

 

This was originally a hardback collection, of which - due to the limitations of bookbinding at the time - it was possible to fit only half the stories in the paperback version, which is what I have here. So I'm missing material from H.G. Wells, Lord Dunsany, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury amongst others, although mostly stuff I've read elsewhere from what I can tell. Those selections which made the cut seem to have been less established names at the time of publication, but Derleth knew what he was doing and there's no particularly weak link in the resulting chain.

That said, this is golden age science-fiction as distinct from any modern variant, so there's not much point getting pissy over the absence of lengthy discussions about the properties of photons. The genre was still evolving, John W. Campbell was just beginning to make a name for himself, and even if everyone was familiar with Wells, Gernsback, and the rest, a lot of what we have here is more or less weird fiction with a few sciencey touches stirred in for flavour, and Donald Wandrei's Something from Above typifies the form as a marginally less purple Lovecraft-style yarn about flying saucers; and where contributions may not quite tick all the recognised weird fiction boxes, they're fucking weird nonetheless.

A.E. van Vogt's Resurrection, for example, teaches us that human beings brought back to life by aliens following the extinction of the human race will have superpowers for no adequately explained reason. The lad was firing on all four cylinders with that one. Elsewhere we find Original Sin in which S. Fowler Wright predicts that philosophy will eventually advance to such a degree as to inspire the entire human race to commit to a surprisingly cheery form of mass suicide, because the purpose of life is the evolution of its own destruction or summink; and Eric Frank Russell's Spiro recruits a shape-shifting alien refugee to the London music hall of the day thus allowing us to imagine what a Tommy Trinder version of Campbell's Who Goes There? might look like.

The rest are mostly cut from the same strange cloth; which you might call dated, but I'd prefer to regard as simply consistent with a particular style and mood associated with the forties, blending deco stylings with post-bomb paranoia and all of our ideas about supermen beginning to look a bit shaky; and, as ever, Derleth brought us the cream of the crop.

Seven Tickets to Hell

Robert Moore Williams Seven Tickets to Hell (1972)
Aside from occasional encounters with Abbott and Costello, little is known of the activities of Frankenstein's monster after the events of Mary Shelley's book, not least his brief career in publishing which brought us the Frankenstein Horror Series back in the early seventies. Frank Belknap Long wrote one, and this is by Robert Moore Williams, of whom I've become quite the fan.

Perhaps anticipating a variant audience to that which presumably read his science-fiction novels, Williams seems to have played it safe with this one in certain respects, channeling his love of Abraham Merritt into a relatively generic adventure which would probably transfer to the big screen with ease, rather than making it up as he went along and stuffing it full of his weirder ideas about the universe and our place therein. It's still reasonably strange given Williams choosing to write in second person, swapping between two main characters addressed as you.

The men you can face. Perhaps they were not as badly wounded as you had thought. This is what you tell yourself. You know this isn't true, you know these men were dead, but you can lie to yourself about them.

He sustains this for the full 190 pages, which is impressive, and the prose positively crackles with that weird energy found in his best books, or his strangest books depending on how you look at it.

Should he require introduction, Williams was a man with certain psychological issues which informed much of his fiction, and many of his common preoccupations and themes appear here as detail to what is more or less Indiana Jones taking on the Mexican narcotics trade, liberally spiced with a heap of mythology-cum-pseudoscience. Of Williams' staples, we get the sacred mountain, ancient underground races, that which man once knew but has since forgotten, a vague cosmic connection, biological robots, and love as a mysterious universal force. There's enough Mexican mythology to suggest the man did his research, and although he gets it somewhat skew-whiff in places, you don't mind because it's Robert Moore Williams and you keep reading just to find out what the hell he's going to do next. Unfortunately what he does next betrays the influence of Merritt more than is usual for this author, so Seven Tickets to Hell isn't anything like so unpredictable or arrestingly weird as Beachhead Planet or The Bell from Infinity; having said which, he's always worth reading, and this one still delivers much more than is promised by the cover - excepting the female secret agent who doesn't seem to be in the book at all, but then it was the seventies.