Greetings and salutations! Welcome readers new and old to another issue of the Official William Emmons Books Newsletter. I met some interesting people selling books at the pop-up event the local Humane Society put on on Saturday. Here is me with a lot of books.
I won’t be selling at an event again for another six weeks. Then I’ll be at RCPL Con in Jamestown, Kentucky, on Saturday, July 27 and at PulpFest in Mars, Pennsylvania, Thursday, Aug. 1 through Sunday, Aug. 4.
There’s not much else to report. Lately I’ve been spending most of my time reading and hanging out in the backyard. A hazard of being a sole proprietor is there’s no one to crack the whip on you. Of course, as a Compleat Science Fiction Fan, reading and thinking about science fiction and fantasy is as important to me as my work as a bookseller. I’m bound to go through moments where the would be public intellectual cum taste maker is foregrounded vis-à-vis the merchant and vice versa. I’m just grateful for my subscribers and readers who are along for the ride. Let’s dig in.
Reading Diary
I’ve been reading far too much to cover meaningfully in one newsletter. Mostly I have been enjoying reading the first issue of F&SF, the single issue where it was simply called The Magazine of Fantasy, and the second issue of Galaxy (from which I’ve already reviewed one story here). I hope to push out a second issue this week on Sunday where I make some initial comparisons between the two publications.
In the meantime, I want to cover two stories from less prominent science fiction magazines. As you can tell from the length of this missive there was some meat on the bone.
“The Queer Ones” by Leigh Brackett
This novelette is an Appalachian science fiction thriller first published in the March 1957 issue of Venture Science Fiction, Mercury Publications’ action and adventure companion to the more literary F&SF. The story deals with themes of otherness and migration and raises questions of verisimilitude with regard to the Appalachian region. I’ll get to all that.
But first, the story raised a problem of authorship for me. And here I mean the way having a certain author’s name attached to a story creates certain expectations about the story. I’ve been in conversation with Leigh Brackett for a hot minute. Brackett was best known as a screen writer and a writer of mood-driven existentialist space opera. At the climax of her career these two streams crossed in her final work, the first draft of the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. (Brackett also wrote a lot of crime fiction—though I’m not sure if anyone still reads it.)
Brackett had one real breakthrough piece of pure quill science fiction, the novel The Long Tomorrow (1955), a look at a post-apocalyptic Anglo-American Protestant society that rejects both technology and urbanization. Gary Wolfe and the Library of America consider it to be one of the six most significant American science fiction novels of the 1950s and Nicola Griffith has argued that it is more successful than her previous Martian novel The Sword of Rhiannon (1949) but to me The Long Tomorrow is merely interesting in comparison to Brackett’s noirish planetary adventures. Stories like “The Beast-Jewels of Mars” and “Shannach—the Last” linger and captivate. It isn’t fair but after reading those stories, one can’t help but be a little disappointed that The Long Tomorrow and the story under review don’t have the backdrop of an otherworldly wilderness full of ancient and strange things.
Not that she doesn’t make an attempt to make the Appalachian mountains mysterious and moody. And “The Queer Ones” and The Long Tomorrow aren’t bad science fiction. Indeed, as science fiction they are better than the planetary adventures which by my rubric more properly constitute fantasy in outer space. If someone else’s name were attached to “The Queer Ones” and The Long Tomorrow I’d like them more. This feels like a bizarre admission but here we are.
To the story! The protagonist and narrator of “The Queer Ones” is Hank Temple, the newspaper editor for Newhale, the seat of a fictional Appalachian county that is home to the eerie Buckhorn Mountain with its snow-covered and cloud-capped peak. The story opens when one of his best friends Doc Callendar summons him to the county hospital to look at some odd x-rays taken by his resident Bossert.
The x-rays are of a little boy named Billy Tate who was badly beaten by his extended family. The x-rays show that the child is exceptionally resilient and that there was no lasting harm. They also show his innards are strangely put together. Familiar organs are in the wrong places and there are extra organs outside the realm of medical knowledge. The three men think they have a mutant on their hands. Each of the men begins to have private ideas about how presenting the boy to the world will make his reputation.
Temple and Callendar take a trip into the remote hills to visit the Tate clan and get another look at the boy. The Tates live in a multigenerational compound of decrepit houses and shacks. Notably, rural electrification has brought them television.
Temple provides sociological commentary. The Tates get by mostly on subsistence, gardening for themselves and growing just enough corn to feed pigs and make liquor. He tells the reader that many think this means they are lazy. In fact, they just don’t like life to be spoiled by hard work. A little bit back handed, no?
The men find that the Tates do not like Billy. This is in part because he is different—red curly hair, longer arms and legs than the other children, a certain je ne sais quoi—and in part because he is illegitimate. Indeed, the family matriarch Ma Tate states plainly that he is not a Tate and that his father ought to come take him away.
The boy’s father, who called himself Bill Jones, entered their lives when he came around claiming to represent a new department store. He offered free TV repair up to $5.00 in value. He worked on the Tates’ TV and caused it to receive better than it had any right to. He got sweet on the young teenager Sally Tate and kept coming back. Billy was conceived in the hayloft. But the department store Jones claimed to work didn’t really exist and Jones stopped coming around. In confidence, he told the Sally he was from a place called Hryllianu.
Temple and Callendar take the back off the TV and see that it has been rebuilt inside and that there’s a small doodad affixed to one of the inner walls. Ma Tate insists they not fiddle with the TV further for fear they will mess it up.
Callendar tries to collect Sally and Billy and take them to hospital to run further tests on the boy. Billy doesn’t like this and runs away into the forest. Callendar asks Sally to talk to the child and says he’ll be back again to get them in a few days.
This never comes to pass because on the way back to town the hospital station wagon is struck by weird green lighting that throws Temple out of the car and into a ditch. The lightning strikes twice and the second strike immolates Callendar as Temple watches in horror.
The resident Bossert and Temple’s other best friend the Sheriff Ed Betts think Temple has lost it when he describes what happened and they send him home. But in the middle of the night Bossert awakens Temple with a phone call to let him know the wing of the hospital that houses radiology is burning down. There are no people in the wing but the boy’s x-rays are there.
Temple rushes to the hospital to cover the story. In darkened woods nearby, he sees a strange woman with a complexion like Billy Tate’s. He chases and captures her and demands information. Before he can get much they are approached by a relatively normal-seeming guy with a gun and a man who seems like an adult version of Billy Tate. The captured woman pleads that Temple release her, arguing that if the two men find him they will kill him. He sees the wisdom of her argument and let’s her go just before the menacing men see him.
Temple reporting this occurrence doesn’t do much for Betts’ assessment of his sanity but for some reason, Betts still takes Temple along on another visit to the Tate clan along with a TV repairman. When they get there they learn that Bill Jones has come and taken Sally and Billy away. Ma Tate was happy about this at first but now finds herself tied up in knots over it.
The TV repairman is taken aback by what he sees inside the TV. He says he would have to take the whole thing apart to understand what was done to it. He is able to discern that the doodad on the wall is a mechanism that is receiving a constant power supply. When the men try to remove the doodad and it explodes.
Later when Temple goes back to the newspaper office, he picks up the phone and forces the local operator to help him cold call people across the county to see if they were visited by Bill Jones in his guise as a TV repairman. He finds a pattern. People around Buckhorn Mountain had TVs worked on.
That night Temple is woken up by the sound of people in his yard. He gets his automatic and sneaks outside to observe. It’s the strange woman and armed man who he saw at the hospital. The man, who we learn is named Marlin, is insisting that the woman throw some kind of incendiary chemical bombs into Temple’s house to kill him. The woman doesn’t want to commit murder and, without activating them, throws the bombs into the tall grass where they will be impossible to find. After she does this, Temple runs up on Marlin and cold cocks him.
The woman tries to runaway but Temple outpaces her and grabs her. Very much without prompting, he kisses her and is revulsed by how cold and alien she is. He notes that he has kissed other women against their wills but they never withdrew so completely like the strange woman. For a moment, he stops referring to her as a “girl” and starts referring to her as a “girl-thing.” In the conversation surrounding this interaction, he learns the woman is named Vadi, that she is a chemist and that the man calling himself Bill Jones is her brother and actually named Arnek.
He takes Vadi and the truck she and Marlin came in and forces Vadi to lead him to their HQ on Buckhorn Mountain. Before ascending, he stops at a gas station and tells the proprietor to call Betts. They reach a shack and a garage where Vadi hops out and picks up some kind of alien weapon. She shoots Temple with green lighting knocking him out.
When he awakens he finds he is still armed. He makes his way through the woods and discovers a weird basecamp with tents and a metal floor. There’s a large pole or antenna. He sees Arnek and notes Marlin has somehow made it back up the mountain and is once again armed. He also notes Billy Tate crying from one of the tents.
Temple follows Marlin into one of the tents which has some kind of control board in it. A struggle ensues and Temple kills Marlin. When he emerges a spaceship is coming down and attaching itself to the pole. He observes that the ship is full of aliens, some quite strange, and perceives that the late Marlin and Arnek are smugglers of unauthorized extrasolar migrants to Earth to whom he immediately applies the pejorative label “wetbacks.”
In his previous conversation with Vadi, Temple learned that Arnek couldn’t quite hack it on Hryllianu where on Earth he was a relative genius. The way Temple has is it figured is that all the immigrants couldn’t quite hack it in whatever galactic society there is out there and come to Earth or similar planets where they can blend in and make it easier. He imagines how many of them might be among us. He figures that many strange people you see but don’t give a second thought to might actually be aliens. On one level, Temple is deeply repulsed by the otherness of the aliens but it’s more complicated than that as we shall see.
What’s interesting is how quickly Temple recognizes Marlin and Jones as what we’d now call coyotes and how quickly he goes to the “wetback” metaphor without any further consideration of how outer space immigration might compare or contrast to its terrestrial equivalent. One generally thinks of immigrants fleeing violence or poverty or, for some middle class migrants, simply seeking their fortune. In any event, the flow of people doesn’t generally run from the rich countries to the poor ones. I’ve never heard of an inept or lazy American engineer etc. moving to Venezuela to seek his fortune in a place with less professional competition. While borrowing the “wetback” language, the story sort of invents its own immigrant narrative.
William Morrison’s “Task of Kayin” presents an interesting foil for “The Queer Ones” on immigration and otherness. Unlike the story under review, it takes the perspective of the immigrant, a refugee scientist from a recently dead civilization who becomes a low wage construction worker. Because of his obvious differences from his fellow workers, e.g., his initial lack of familiarity with English, they know he is an immigrant even if they don’t know he is an extraterrestrial. They’re still able to sympathize with him. Difference isn’t portrayed as revolting and strange.
Where Brackett evokes paranoia and quiet infiltration by bad actors. Morrison postulates the possibility of affinity across difference and that incomplete understanding need not lead to antipathy. Indeed, in Morrison’s paradigm, difference is even beneficial. Morrison’s protagonist’s alien knowledge leads him to sabotage a factory whose product would have inadvertently ended human life. For a glorious moment at the end of the story, the hero takes flight and we learn for the first time he has had wings all along.
Per the story’s title, “The Queer Ones” and its narrator are preoccupied with the differences between aliens—in context, metaphorical immigrants—and humans—in context, metaphorical native born Americans. Paranoia and antipathy are a significant part of the framework—remember, the “girl” became a “girl-thing.” That’s not its totality though and it’s not where the story leaves the question of otherness.
As Temple observes the doings of the alien people smugglers, he is noticed and eight armed and uniformed individuals come after him. He considers the implausibility of a one-man human versus alien “Thermopylae” and turns tail, grabbing and carrying off Billy Tate with him.
But before they are captured, the armed individuals give up and they cross paths with a posse led by Betts. Temple fills Betts in and the posse makes its way up the mountain to the alien encampment. All the aliens are aboard the craft except Vadi who is leading Sally Tate onto the ship. In later days, Temple likes to recall that despite everything Sally entered the vessel willingly. Arnek and his confederates take off, Sally in tow.
The story closes with Temple taking Billy as his ward since Billy’s human family do not want the part-alien bastard. Temple considers marriage in order to give Billy a better home but finds himself preoccupied with memories of Vadi. He pines for her to return and wonders if there wasn’t something more compelling beneath the initial revulsion. Temple’s affinity for the other expands enough to bring Billy into his home. In Temple’s imagination, the strange woman Vadi goes from “girl” to “girl-thing” to the one that got away. We also have the model of Sally’s deep affinity for Jones and willingness to sacrifice everything to go with him to space.
I liked this story fine but with caveats. As discussed, it’s not indicative of Brackett’s best work. Moreover, its treatment of Appalachia lacked verisimilitude in terms of economics and geography. Newhale has industry in the form of a feed mill and tanning concern. For me, this raised the question of where they grazed the cows for the leather and how they transported corn and feed in and out en masse. Perhaps Newhale is a railroad hub. In any event, by the 1950s the rural Mountain South was already in rough shape and the exit point for the largest internal migration in US history that no one ever really talks about. Newhale seems too good to be true. Additionally, the relatively diminutive Appalachian mountains are not known for high, snow-covered and cloud-capped peaks.
Of course, I may be projecting the Mountain South onto a story set in a different part of Appalachia. Though Brackett was a California native, she and her husband Edmond Hamilton spent a great deal of time in Kinsman, Ohio, in Trumbull County on the northwestern outskirts of the region. Still I think the Tates are meant to have Mountain South energy and removing the story to Ohio or Pennsylvania doesn’t account for Buckhorn Mountain’s anomalous height.
What I do like about the setting is that, like Stanley G. Weinbaum’s Dawn of Flame (1936) and much of Brackett’s friend Ray Bradbury’s writings, it decenters science fiction from its home terrain of the coastal urban areas. As John Mellencamp puts it, “Got nothing against a big town. . . .but my bed is in a small town.”
“Comfort Me, My Robot” by Robert Bloch
This delightfully deranged story, from the January 1955 issue of Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy, is my first Bloch experience. I’ve been supposed to read him for years. Of course, I’ve heard of Psycho and, more important to me, he was pals with my favorite science fiction author Philip José Farmer.
“Comfort Me, My Robot” imagines a far future where the fields of robotics and psychology are much advanced. Robots do all the labor and the well-to-do can even afford robot facsimiles of themselves to stand in for them at weddings and funerals and other such droll occasions.
This last tidbit is very sparingly doled in a conversation between a man and his Adjustor, which is what they call therapists in the future. In short, the man is jealous and thinks his wife is keeping secrets from him. He says that instead of violating her personal right to privacy by questioning her about the matter, he wants to strangle her. The Adjustor agrees this is the best course of action all the while denouncing the backwardness of various 20th century psychological practices that involved trying to name and talk through various mental disturbances rather than acting on them directly. It’s only after a bit that that we get the reveal that the men are talking about killing off the robot simulacrum of his wife. It is affective and disorienting.
We get an interesting scene where the man does in fact strangle and then incinerate his wife’s robot but what’s really interesting is the maneuvering between the man and his Adjustor that follows. Following killing his wife’s robot, he has another meeting with his Adjustor where he reveals that he knows that the Adjustor and his wife are planning to have a baby. He demands to kill his Adjustor.
It is arranged, or so the Adjustor says, for the robot of his Adjustor to be present at the man’s house to be killed. The man says part of the “therapy” is making his wife watch the murder.
What follows is this. The man comes home and before he can raise his weapon, the Adjustor blows him away. You see, it’s the actual Adjustor and he’s arranged his records to make it to look he acted in self-defense against an unbalanced patient.
But wait! It wasn’t his patient he killed but his patient’s robot! The man enters and blows away both his wife and the Adjustor. He feels much better.
I’m definitely adding Robert Bloch to my list of authors I want to keep an eye out for when I’m reading around old magazines and anthologies. I really enjoyed this one.